| Volume
10, number 1 (June 2003)
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL FOREWORD
Editors
REASONABLE
MAN’ AND ‘REASONABLE DOUBT’: THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, ANGLO
CULTURE AND ANGLO-AMERICAN LAW
Anna
Wierzbicka
This paper
investigates, in a historical and cultural perspective, the
meaning of the word reasonable, and in particular, of the phrases
reasonable man and reasonable doubt, which play an important role
in Anglo-American law. Drawing on studies of the British
Enlightenment such as Porter (2000), it traces the modern English
concept of ‘reasonableness’ back to the intellectual
revolution brought about by the writings of John Locke, who (as
Porter says) ‘replaced rationalism with reasonableness, in a
manner which became programmatic for the Enlightenment in
Britain’. The paper also argues that the meaning of the word
reasonable has changed over the last two centuries and that as a
result, the meaning of the phrases reasonable man and beyond
reasonable doubt has also changed; but since these phrases were
continually used for over two centuries and became entrenched in
Anglo-American law as well as in ordinary language, and since the
older meaning of reasonable is no longer known to most speakers,
the change has, generally speaking, gone unnoticed. On a
theoretical level, the paper argues that meaning cannot be
investigated in a precise and illuminating manner without a
coherent semantic framework; and that a suitable framework is
provided by the ‘NSM’ semantic theory.
Keywords: reasonable
doubt, reasonable man, natural semantic metalanguage
IDENTIFYING
THE SOURCE OF CRITICAL DETAILS IN CONFESSIONS
Martin D.
Hill
Interrogations
leading to confessions can elicit both an admission of guilt and
details to help validate the confession. Using a novel means of
analysis, the interrogation was treated as a series of dynamic
informational exchanges and the source of key details was
identified. Questions and answers were classified according to the
degree to which they provided information. Using a test case, in
212 of 340 questions the interrogators provided details to confirm
or deny. In other questions, critical details were provided by the
police without requesting confirmation. This pattern was reflected
when the confession was divided into individual topics. None of
the key, specific, verifiable details were provided by the
confessor. This method of analysis is presented as a means of
assessing the degree to which a confessor demonstrates guilty
knowledge.
Keywords:
confessions, interrogation, guilty knowledge
EARWITNESS
IDENTIFICATION OVER THE TELEPHONE AND IN FIELD SETTINGS
A. Daniel
Yarmey
Earwitnesses were
asked to describe and identify the voice of a young woman to whom
they had spoken approximately five minutes earlier either in a
naturalistic field setting or over the telephone. Witnesses were
given a single tape-recorded voice of either the target or a
highly similar foil, or a target present or a target absent
six-person voice line-up. Half of the witnesses in the
naturalistic settings were given a photograph of the target as a
retrieval cue when they attempted to describe and identify the
voice of the target. Witnesses gave few descriptions of the
speaker’s voice. Voice identification was poor in both types of
setting. Those witnesses who were prepared for a memory test were
superior to non-prepared witnesses on the subsequent
identification test. Photographic retrieval cues did not influence
voice descriptions, but did minimize false identifications on the
target absent line-up for witnesses prepared for the test. The
six-person line-up proved to be significantly superior to the
one-person lineup in minimizing false identifications of the most
highly similar sounding foil.
Keywords: speaker
identification, lineup, showup, voice description, telephone
NOT SO FRESH
IN THE MIND: A FORENSIC LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF SUSPECTED MEMORIZED
NARRATIVE ESSAYS
Graham
Kennedy
The Hong Kong
Certificate of Education (HKCE) English Language writing exam is
taken by more than 110, 000 fifth-form students every year. The
candidates are required to write a narrative, discursive or
descriptive essay of approximately 300 words. During the marking
process, some 150–200 scripts are usually identified as
‘memorized’ and tagged for special marking. About a third of
these are finally assessed as being wholly or partly memorized and
are penalized through having the memorized parts disregarded.
Until recently, the assessment process has been a wholly
subjective and ‘unscientific’ one. Newly developed software,
however, has allowed for a swifter and more systematic analysis of
such scripts and revealed a previously unsuspected degree of
sophistication in the use of memorized material
Keywords: CopyCatch,
narrative, examinations, metaphors, Chinese
BETTER TOOLS
FOR THE TRADE AND HOW TO USE THEM
David Woolls
This article is a
follow-up to ‘Tools for the Trade’ (Woolls and Coulthard,
1998). All the programs in the Vocalyse Toolkit described in that
article have been developed in response to the requirements
arising from particular groups of cases, some of which are used
below to illustrate both the use of the tools and how they have
been extended in the past four years. One application of Copycatch,
the most widely used tool and that which was developed first, is
described in Kennedy ([x-ref to be inserted at proof stage]), so
only the latest functional changes are reported below. Because one
of the central features of the current version of all the tools is
their use of colour, no examples have been included in this paper.
The reader is invited to visit the Copycatch web site, www.copycatch.freeserve.co.uk,
where annotated examples will be found.
Keywords: plagiarism,
collusion, patchwriting, historical authorship attribution
FORENSIC
STUDY OF A CASE INVOLVING SMS TEXT-TO-SPEECH CONVERSION
Michael
Jessen, Stefan Gfroerer and Olaf Koster
The process of
decoding the content of a message involving Short
Message-to-speech conversion is described in the form of a
forensic case study. The intelligibility of the message was low,
primarily due to the fact that the written input to the
text-to-speech system was inTurkish although the system was
designed for text-tospeech conversion in German. This created some
form of synthesised Turkish with a German “accent”. It is
shown how “spectrogram reading” can be employed in the task of
deriving phonetic categories from the signal of the synthetic
speech message. In order to obtain a maximally accurate estimate
of the input typed by the sender, one disputed passage of the SMS-to-speech
message was subjected to a simulation. It is described how a full
match between the case material and the simulated passage was
obtained, despite typographical errors and incorrect Turkish
orthography on the part of the sender.
Keywords: Forensic
speech decoding; speech synthesis; text-to-speech; Short
REVIEW
ARTICLE: 'FORENSIC SPEAKER IDENTIFICATION', BY PHILIP ROSE
(2002)Michael Jessen
PHD ABSTRACTS
OBITUARIES
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