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特别报道:第七届国际法律语言学大会在英国召开


第七届国际法律语言学大会论文摘要

(一)

Conference Abstracts


Michelle Aldridge and June Luchjenbroers

Cardiff University and University of Wales,Bangor
Questions,Metaphors &Frames:Methods of manipulation, and subsequent analysis


Allan Bell

Auckland University of Technology
Assessing the professionalism of a television news presenter


Susan Berk-Seligson

Vanderbilt University
False confession:linguistic and extralinguistic evidence of coercion in a police interrogation


Sue Blackwell,Jess Shapero and Willem Meijs

University of Birmingham

Texts of Murder and Martyrdom

On 2nd November 2004,the Netherlands was shocked by the murder of the controversial journalist Theo van Gogh.He had been both shot and stabbed repeatedly,and a knife was left pinning a letter to his body:a lengthy diatribe addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali,a Somali-born Dutch MPwho had recently made a film with van Gogh about domestic violence against Muslim women.The letter informed Ali that she was next on the killer's hit-list.Afurther letter was found on the suspect,Mohammed Bouyeri.Like the first it was written in fluent Dutch,but this text was in verse and described the writer's expectations of martyrdom.Of the 40%or so of suicides in Western Europe who leave notes,very few are also killers.The corollary of this is that very few murderers go on to kill themselves and leave suicide notes.Typically,suicide notes are full of affection and,according to some research,have a positive outlook.This paper confronts a type of suicide which is different from that usually considered in academic research:the issue of "intent"is less applicable in these cases and it seems,anecdotally at least,that most of these suicides do leave notes.Yet even in cases of suicide bombings in the Middle East where video testaments are common,texts left at the scene of the attack are unheard of.The van Gogh texts probably constitute the first example of an attacker documenting in a European language their expectations of both killing and dying in an intended martyrdom operation.This paper will analyse the language of both the "murder note"and the "suicide note"in this case and will consider questions such as "How do murder-suicide notes differ from the typical suicide note?"and "should one expect the language of a suicide note to be typical of the writer's usual personal style?"


Victor J Boucher
Universitéde Montréal

On the measurable linguistic correlates of deceit in recounting passed events

Deceit has been defined as a deliberate attempt to create by a communicative act,and without forewarning,a belief that is untrue or inaccurate.This presentation deals with deceit in a situation where speakers recount passed events that cannot be immediately verified.In this context,a number of linguistic variables can serve to reveal a speaker’s intention to deceive, thereby establishing the need for investigators to verify recounted events.Acomprehensive bibliography will be made available on 41variables that have been proposed.Of these,only 13linguistic variables present acceptable degrees of reliability and do not require acoustic analyses beyond phonetic transcription.Considering these variables,an experiment was performed with the purpose of isolating the specific aspects that can discriminate deceitful from truthful discourse across speakers and “themes”.Twenty university students were asked to recount,in turn,events that took place and that did not take place in five different places (in a hospital,at school,in a bar,on vacation,and at work).The recorded speech provided a corpus of 200three-to-five minute discourses varying in theme, with half representing truthful and half inaccurate or untrue accounts.Currently,50%of the recorded samples representing ten subjects have been transcribed in ASCIIformat using particular coding.Descriptive statistics were derived by applying routines of an available freeware program.Paired t-tests for the analysed samples show significant differences on given variables such as hesitation,lexical repetition (type/token)and utterance length. Amultivariate discriminant analysis will be applied to determine the successfulness of linear combinations of variables in correctly classifying deceitful discourse.This analysis will also determine how classification rates vary with individuals and themes.The discussion will stress the advantage of speech over written testimony as a means of soliciting variations in the particular variables that can reveal deceit.


Deborah Bradford and Jane Goodman-Delahunty
University of New South Wales

Truthful vs.deceptive confessions:Investigating the performance of statement analysis techniques at detecting deception in the confessional context

Detection of deception and the accuracy of credibility assessments is an important forensic concern.The prevalence of false confessions is unknown,but detecting false confessions is significant to the successful functioning of the legal system as false confessions may lead to false conviction or imprisonment of innocent persons (Davis &O’Donohue,2003).Whether genuine and deceptive confessions can be successfully distinguished has received scant research attention.In the current investigation we examined the utility of text-based techniques focussing on statement content, such as the Aberdeen Report Judgment Scales (ARJS)(Sporer,1998) to distinguish truthful and false confessions.In this study, participants gave either genuine or deceptive accounts of autobiographical events according to the real/simulating paradigm (Ashkar,2002).Participants in the genuine condition gave a detailed confessional narrative to a second experimenter of an act they had previously committed.Participants in the deceptive condition were “simulators”required to adopt a genuine confession as their own and convince a second experimenter that they had actually experienced the event.All narratives were transcribed and subsequently analysed by lay observers and police officers trained in the application of ARJScriteria.Findings are discussed in terms of the performance of law enforcement professionals versus laypersons,the viability of statement analysis techniques to assess credibility of confession evidence and the legal implications in the confessional context.


Christian Braun,Silvia Hansen-Schirra,Kerstin Kunz and Stella Neumann
Saarland University

The Syntactic Complexity of German Legalese -An Empirical Approach

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the syntactic complexity of German legal texts.In order to gain insights into characteristics of legal language we compare German Federal Constitutional Court decisions and press releases as well as newspaper reports on these decisions with respect to a range of grammatical features.Our main interest is clausal as well as phrasal complexity.We claim that the court decisions display features of legal LSP(Language for Special Purposes)which make them hard to understand.These features are expected to be less salient in the press releases and to almost disappear in the newspaper reports.In our analysis of clauses,we process the above mentioned three corpora using a topological parser.It is based on the theory-neutral notion of sentence topology specifically developed for German.The parser structures sentences into a series of neighbouring and embedded sub-parts,so-called topological fields.The phrases are analysed manually using an XML editor.Both the automatic output of the parser and the output of the manual annotation are double-checked by the annotators.We interpret syntactic complexity by counting the number of tokens and phrases per field and analyse nesting on clausal and phrasal level.This enables us to pinpoint patterns which are unique to court decisions as compared to press releases as well as newspaper reports.Since grammatical complexity has a major impact on comprehensibility,the results of the analysis serve our long-term goal to develop linguistic strategies for improving the comprehensibility of legal texts.We expect that a number of phenomena found in our analysis -e.g.overloaded 'Vorfelds',deep clausal nesting,heavy phrases -will play an important role in formulating such strategies.

 

Ron Butters and Jackson Nichols
Duke University

What Can Go Wrong When Linguists Testify in American Trademark Litigation

“Dictionary definitions”is a legally determinative factor that American courts may consider in deciding whether a putative trademark is GENERIC(and hence not legally protectable).Linguists who testify in such cases are permitted to interpret and expand upon existing dictionary entries,using established linguistic and lexicographical methodologies.Unfortunately,the role of the linguist in such cases is more complex and perilous than is commonly perceived.Our presentation examines how a noted linguist’s apparently flawed understanding of genericness led to testimony that helped to created a still-unresolved legal muddle.A Federal District Court (the 6th in 1969) ruled that opry ‘medley of country music,dance,and comedy routines’was not generic and hence a legitimate trademark of the Grand Ole Opry (which had registered the trademark in 1950after having used it for some 22years). However,another court (the 8th Circuit in 1982)ruled instead that opry is generic,hence not protectable.The crucial difference in the presentations of the two cases:in 1982,the attorneys challenging the claims of the Grand Ole Opry employed a respected linguist and lexicographer,Fred Cassidy,who testified that opry (a dialectal variation of opera)is "generic" because it is (indisputably)a term long applied in American folk speech to various kinds of theatrical performances.Legally,however,this conclusion seems open to serious question because,as used by the Grand Ole Opry (and in attempted use by rivals),Opry is far more specialized in meaning than is the ordinary dialect term opry.As such,it was not,at least at its inception, the “name of the thing itself”but rather an imaginative semantic narrowing of the original word.Cassidy’s testimony,apparently a fundamental underpinning of the 1982ruling,while no doubt given in good faith,essentially blurred the legal and linguistic issues.


Sophie Cacciaguidi-Fahy
National University of Ireland,Galway

The ‘liaison dangereuse’between individual liability and collective guilt: interpreting the language of Article 7(1)of the ICTYstatute

Despite the methodical recognition of individual liability in international criminal law to avoid the collectivisation of guilt,we continue to assume that crimes against humanity,such as genocide,express the actions and the implicit guilt of entire groups of people.The overall purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the language of one article of the ICTYstatute has been used by judicial discourse to construct a peculiar legal doctrine in international criminal law.Iwill endeavour to do this by analysing the paradoxical relationship between a collectivist signifier,‘joint criminal enterprise’,used deliberately to establish the individual nature of a signified,‘individual liability’in the quest to avoid collective guilt. Iwill begin my analysis by reflecting on the nature of the joint criminal enterprise doctrine first enunciated by the ICTYas implicitly deriving from the language of Article 7(1)of the ICTY Statute.Iwill then reflect on the teleological interpretation by the Appeal Chamber of the language of article 7(1)to extend the concept of mens rea beyond its established frontiers and the implications this linguistic/purposive interpretation has had in redefining the concepts of individual and collective criminal liability.In conclusion,Iwill attempt to demonstrate that,although joint criminal enterprise is a sufficiently ambiguous concept to stand as a point solution to establish individual liability of multiple actors within a group and induce the necessary ‘stigmatisation’of serious crimes against humanity,from a legal discourse standpoint,judicial discourse has continued to reason in the traditional legal framework of liability constructed on ‘simplistic’ notions of responsibility based on the notions of principal or accessory, using the same rhetoric and language of that traditional model.


Carole Chaski
Institute for Linguistic Evidence,Inc

Alternative Distance Measures for Validating the Syntactic Analysis Method

Working with 85documents authored by 17American writers,the syntactic analysis method (Chaski 2001,2004)correctly classified at least 90%up to 99.2%of all the documents in several different experiments.These experiments included multiple-author classification as well as pair-of-authors classification.Further,the experiments included author-to-author as well as intra-author document classification.Finally,the experiments included several alternative distance measures implemented in SPSS,SAS JMPand Excel.These results demonstrate the validity of the method as a tool for determining authorship and suggest standard protocols under which the method optimally operates.


Jordi Cicres and M Teresa Turell

Universitat Pompeu Fabra,Barcelona

Short and long-term variation in intonation patterns:a preliminary study for speaker identification

In this study we examine some preliminary data related to intonation patterns in Catalan as useful variables for speaker identification.Acorpus of read texts – recorded in two different sessions with a temporal gap of one year –of 6 Catalan speakers is used.There are many different ways to pronounce a sentence,depending on pragmatic and discursive uses,such as questions, statements,exclamations,hesitation,sarcasm etc.In order to achieve these pragmatic and discursive goals,speakers need to modify several aspects of their voice,implementing a melodic line (or intonation)in their speech. Pitch,voice quality,tempo,rhythm and loudness are the phonetic correlates of intonation (Clark and Yallop 1995;Prieto 2002).In this study,only pitch is taken into account.The hypothesis tested in this study is that there will be less intra-speaker than inter-speaker differences in the intonation patterns of both short and long-term samples.Further research will involve conducting the same experiment with spontaneous speech.To carry out the labelling and analysis of the data,the International Transcription System for Intonation (INTSINT)(Hirst,Di Cristo and Espesser 2000)is used.The fundamental frequency (F0)contour has been previously stylized by means of the MOMELalgorithm (Hirst and Espesser 1993).

References:
Clark,J.and Yallop,C.(1995).An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Second edition.Oxford.Blackwell Publishing.
Hirst,D.and Espesser,R.(1993).‘Automatic modelling of fundamental frequency using a quadratic spline function’.In Travaux de l’Institut de Phonétique d’Aix 15:71-85.
Prieto,P.(2002).Entonació.Models,teoria,mètodes.Barcelona.Ariel.
Hirst,D.;Di Cristo,A.and Espesser,R.(2000).‘Levels of representation and levels of analysis for the description of intonation systems’.In Horne, M.(ed.).Prosody:Theory and Experiment.The Netherlands.Kluwer Academic Publishers.55-88.


John Conley and Cynthia Williams

University of North Carolina School of Law,Chapel Hill and University of Illinois

The Discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility

The corporate social responsibility (“CSR”)movement is one of the most recent significant developments in corporate law and governance.The governments of Europe and the United Kingdom have begun to put significant pressure on corporations to go beyond the narrow pursuit of financial returns for shareholders and to take into account the interests of a broader class of “stakeholders”that includes employees,local communities,people of countries where raw materials are procured,governments,and NGOs.Newly enacted laws and regulations require companies to consider and report on the social and environmental risks to which they may be subject.The law is also encouraging institutional investors such as pension funds to take such risks into account in evaluating companies for investment.Although the law in the United States is nowhere near as well developed,many observers of the international financial scene believe that the trend will soon affect the U.S. as well.In response to these new legal mandates as well as pressure from various constituencies,multinational corporations have begun to engage in new forms of communications,including multi-stakeholder dialogues and expanded social and environmental disclosure.While these communication processes are a reaction to heightened social expectations that are being conveyed to corporate leaders,the companies themselves are controlling the discussion and debate and thereby shaping the same social expectations they are ostensibly responding to.It is thus unclear whether these communication strategies will lead to substantive changes in corporate behavior,or will simply provide safe (from the corporations point of view)venues for the disaffected to let off steam.Our paper reports on a project that uses qualitative social science techniques,including ethnography and discourse analysis,to examine these new communication processes.We have interviewed people in corporations,NGOs, socially responsible investing funds,and public relations firms,both in the U.S.and in the U.K.;have attended major corporate social responsibility gatherings as ethnographic observers;and have undertaken discourse analyses of a number of published corporate social responsibility reports.The specific research question we are addressing include:whether the new communication strategies reflect,or indeed bring about,changes in internal corporate behavior;whether differences in regulatory cultures (e.g.,U.S.v.U.K.v.EU) are reflected in the corporate social responsibility behavior of individual companies chartered in the respective jurisdictions;and,relatedly,whether companies retain their home approach when they do business in places with different regulatory cultures.The ultimate question,of course,is whether the new behaviors demanded by the CSRmovement will amount to substance or mere form.


Burns Cooper
University of Alaska Fairbanks

Justice à la Mode:Potential pitfalls of electronic modes of courtroom discourse

Electronic modes of communicating and presenting information are becoming increasingly common in courtrooms in the USA(mirroring their increased use in other fields such as education and business).“E-courtrooms”and video arraignments are increasingly accepted.In some cases,judges,prosecutors, and defense attorneys are all pleased with such arrangements,both because they can reduce the length of trials and because they make conveniences such as speech-to-text transcription more feasible (e.g.,“E-Courtrooms Designed to Reduce Trial Time,”AP,21September 2004).However,there are potential downsides to electronic modes that should be considered before embracing them wholesale.Linguists are well aware that transmission of words (putting packets of information through a “conduit”)is only part of the work accomplished by oral communication.Physical presence in the courtroom can give important pragmatic cues to interpreting speech,including the physical orientation of speakers,better access to facial expressions,gestures,and perhaps intonational cues,and ease of recognizing who is talking at any one time.For especially vulnerable defendants and witnesses,these cues can be crucial to their ability to contribute meaningfully to the discourse and thus (in the case of defendants)to their own defense.Lacking such cues can undermine some of the most basic pragmatic and communicative principles,such as the Gricean maxim of Relevance and some felicity conditions for speech acts.This paper will survey the prevalence of certain electronic modes of courtroom discourse,and then focus on a particular case in Fairbanks,Alaska, in which a video arraignment of a mentally and physically disabled man may have contributed to a highly problematic result.The paper will examine the possibility that for persons whose ability to understand what is happening in a legal case is compromised in some way to begin with (and this could include not only the mentally disabled,but others such as the deaf,the blind, persons of limited proficiency in English,and persons whose cultural backgrounds involve assumptions about discourse that differ from the prevailing legal culture),the abstraction and loss of nonverbal information involved in incorporating electronic discourse may add to their disadvantage.


Richard Creech

Attorney-at-Law

Language Law and Celtic Identity in the European Union

The Celts once roamed over much of the land that now constitutes the European Union.Today, however,speakers of Celtic languages (Irish,Welsh,Scots Gaelic and Breton) are found mainly in isolated pockets on the periphery of this territory.This paper examines how the EU’s legal system has interacted with these languages,both with regards to their status within the EU’s own internal organs as well as its effects on language policy within the three Member States where Celtic languages are spoken.The EUdoes not accord the Celtic languages the same treatment it bestows on other languages,nor does it treat all Celtic languages equally.This variation flows from the differences in the attitudes of Member States towards their respective Celtic identities,which range from open (if ambiguous)celebration in Ireland,to tolerance in the United Kingdom,to overt hostility in France.Irish,as the only Celtic language from an officially Celtic state,is the only Celtic language that is used in EUlegal settings,but it has been given a highly qualified status that reflects the Irish Republic’s own ambivalence to its indigenous tongue. The use of the Celtic languages within the various Member States is also affected by the EU’s substantive economic law,as rules regarding domestic language usage may run afoul of the treaty-based rights that citizens of the EUhave to engage in free commercial movement throughout the Union.The European Court of Justice in Groener v.Minister for Education (Case C-379/87, 1989ECR3987)considered the impact of an Irish-language requirement that operated to deny a Dutch woman employment at an art college in Dublin.This paper will analyze the Court’s opinion and discuss its implications for language policy in other Celtic lands,with particular attention to the linguistic situation in Wales.


Bart DeFrancq

Ghent University

Europe's constitution:a terminological battleground

2004was one of the most successful years for the European integration process,with significant progress on the enlargement front with the accession of ten new member States,but also on the integration front,with the adoption by the European Council of a European Constitution.It seems,however,that Europe has reached the limits of its potential to further enlarge or integrate. Turkey's possible accession provokes strong reservations and the Constitution itself seems to put an end to a tradition of visionary wording in the Treaties that preceded it.My paper will focus on this and other aspects of the language used in the Constitution and,particularly,on what the language reveals about the negotiations that led to the Constitution.It will discuss the efforts that have been made towards the use of plain language and a greater transparency of the institutional terminology,but it will also highlight the half-bakedness of many of the results (what is,for instance,a /legislative function/or the /Community way/method/when the European Community(ies)has(ve)ceased to exist?).On the basis of a comparison with other constitutions and other European Treaties,Iwill argue that too much progress on these two fronts would have brought the Constitution intolerably close to the model of ordinary constitutions,which in the view of many and not in the least of the Convention's Chairman was to be avoided.Iwill also briefly touch upon the role played by the Académie française in correcting the already approved draft version of the Constitution.


Du Jinbang
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Information Processing and Utilization in Courtroom Interactions

In the domain of legal language,courtroom discourse is representative of information processing and utilization which constitute the core of the interaction between participants in the courtroom.Thus the research into this aspect may be illuminating for the whole process of courtroom trial.Some researches of information processing mainly enquire into communication and communication strategies.Others go further to focus on the linguistic aspect. Both schools are contributive to research in courtroom discourse.The present paper,in the light of previous research in communication and information processing,tries to develop a model of information processing in the courtroom setting.This model comprises three tiers:the first is the interactive orientations of participants who often have different attitudes toward a specific piece of information,and the social relations of the participants as are formed in the courtroom context,on which the attitudes are based;the second is the linguistic strategies which are employed by the participants to realize their goals of communication;the third is the specific linguistic devices used which are the embodiment of the strategies. For setting up this model and testifying its feasibility,data are collected from some Chinese courts.Cases of different kinds are included to ensure the extensive applicability of the model.Though the model is to be set up in the Chinese context,it may hopefully cast light upon similar studies of different legal languages and in different legal contexts.One evident limitation is that the model is a tentative exploration into information utilization in the courtroom context.Alot of ensuing research has to be done before the model is generally accepted as satisfactory.


Sandra Evans
The University of the West Indies,St.Augustine Campus,Trinidad and Tobago.

The Use of Court Clerks as ''Makeshift'Legal Interpreters in St.Lucian Courts

St.Lucia’s legal system is modeled on British law and the official language of the law is Standard English.However there are native St.Lucians who lack written and/or spoken proficiency in English.These persons generally speak St.Lucian French-lexicon Creole,which is the unofficial,national language of St. Lucia.This language is not mutually intelligible with any form of English. When these Creole-speaking persons appear as defendants,witnesses or victims before the court,they require the assistance of a legal interpreter to facilitate their comprehension of and participation in the court proceedings. At present,there are no trained legal interpreters in French-lexicon Creole in Saint Lucia.Consequently,as the need for an interpreter arises in the courts,in both criminal and civil matters,a regular Clerk of Courts becomes a ‘makeshift’legal interpreter.These Clerks play a crucial role in the proceedings,as their interpretation determines what information is recorded by the magistrate.This paper examines the inadequacies and implications of using Court Clerks as makeshift legal interpreters in St.Lucian courts.It also highlights some of the difficulties experienced by these interpreters resulting from a lack of training and standardized procedures.


Lysbeth Ford and Dominic McCormack
Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education,NT Australia and MARLUK Link-Up,Darwin,NT Australia

The Murrinh-patha Legal Glossary:a bridge between laws

This paper reports on a ground-breaking project to produce a glossary of commonly-used English legal terms in an Australian Indigenous language.It is a response to the statistically significant incarceration rates of Indigenous Australians whose limited command or complete lack of English puts them at a severe disadvantage when they are confronted head-on by the Australian legal system. Magistrates,police and legal aid services regularly find themselves hamstrung by the lack of a common language to communicate with defendants,detainees and clients alike.Indigenous interpreters,while fluent in the first language of their clients,often lack sufficient specific English competency to be able to decipher the meanings of English legal terms.Funded by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and The Law Society of the Northern Territory Public Purposes Trust,the project was undertaken by Ford,an experienced linguist,several Murrinh-patha elders,John Sheldon,a Darwin-based legal aid lawyer,and McCormack,a lawyer fluent in Murrinh-patha. Murrinh-patha was chosen because it,rather than English or Kriol,is the lingua franca of approximately 2,500Indigenous Australians in the Thamarrurr Region,400km south-west of Darwin in the Daly River Aboriginal Land Trust area of the Northern Territory of Australia,and the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

The project has had several successful outcomes:-

-a legal glossary of the most commonly used English legal terms;
-increased understanding of the legal process by the Murrinh-patha elders who worked on the project;
-increased understanding of the subtleties of Murrinh-patha by the non-Indigenous researchers.

The glossary has also proved a useful pedagogical tool in the training of Indigenous interpreters,because it consists largely of paraphrases which provide an Australian Indigenous context for each legal concept.The rigour with which it was conducted is evident in the morpheme by morpheme glosses provided for each Murrinh-patha translation.

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2005年7月18日

 

刘蔚铭法律语言学研究

2002-05-06创建