| Volume
8, Number 2 (December 2001)
Contents
Full Text
Kirk
P.H. Sullivan and Frank Kügler
Was
the knowledge of the second language or the age difference the
determining factor?
In
a legal setting a witness may be asked to recognize a suspect
based on a voice sample alone. Previous research has shown that
knowledge of a language has an effect on an individual’s ability
to identify speakers. Recent research using a set of voice
line-ups has demonstrated that there was no unambiguous
improvement in the ability to recognize and identify speakers
during the four years of BA (hons) Swedish study by British
university students. This research, however, used a younger group
of high school students as the control group of listeners with no
knowledge of Swedish. This paper investigates, using the same
methodology, whether the difference in this earlier study, between
the control group and the three university groups was due to
knowledge of Swedish or age. The results of this study show that
knowledge of Swedish was the factor which resulted in the
difference between the control group and the three experimental
groups in the earlier study.
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Philip
Harrison
GSM
interference cancellation for forensic audio: a report on work in
progress
A
central aspect of forensic phonetic casework concerns the
transcription of noisy recordings. An increasing problem in this
area of work is the contamination of recordings with interference
caused by radio transmissions from GSM mobile phones. Transmitting
phones emit short duration radio-frequency pulses at a rate of 217
Hz. The induced interference signal contains the 217 Hz
fundamental and a large number of harmonics that overlap the
frequency range of speech, and therefore severely degrade speech
intelligibility. Listener fatigue is increased due to the harsh
sound of the interference, and overall the transcription of such
audio samples is problematic. This paper describes the progressing
development of a filter to assist the forensic phonetician in
carrying out the transcription of such contaminated recordings.
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John
Gibbons
Legal
transformations in Spanish: an ‘audiencia’ in Chile
There
is a small literature on the transformations that occur in
transcripts in legal English (Eades 1996; Walker 1990), but little
on what happens in languages other than English. This is an
important issue for Roman/Continental law systems, which rely in
their decision making largely upon written transcripts of oral
evidence. This study examines the linguistic consequences of the
transcription process, based upon Spanish language tape recordings
of oral submissions, and the written ‘declaraciones’
(statements) that emerge, in a labour court in Santiago de Chile.
It reveals far-reaching consequences for the language of the
evidence, particularly because of the greater planning and editing
potential of writing. There are tendencies to move to more complex
syntactic structures, to use more passive type structures thereby
colouring blame attribution, to use more technical language, and
to edit material, both unnecessary redundancies and substantive
facts. These findings support current changes to the Chilean
justice system, which replace this type of interview with open
court hearings.
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Frances
Rock
The
genesis of a witness statement
This
article steps back from the plethora of learned articles on
simulated interviews with witnesses, the success of interview
techniques and cognitive loads on interviewees and interviewers;
it reports a detailed examination of the way witness statements
are taken, from the first verbal account given by a witness to the
final written statement penned by their interviewer. The article
examines a statement-taking session and the resulting statement.
It presents examples to illustrate which aspects of the
witness’s account are changed during the statement-taking
session and how. That is, in what ways, and through what processes
does the original version provided by the witness change through
the subsequent renderings during the statement-taking session and
in the final statement text? There are several reasons for doing
this. This enables us to understand: firstly, a little more about
what a witness statement is; secondly, how witness statements
become what they are; and thirdly, in which ways witness
statements might not be what they at first appear to be.
Full Text
Peter
Tiersma
Textualizing
the Law
Much
of the work of lawyers consists of the production or
interpretation of various sorts of legal texts. Many of these
texts are authoritative or operative, in the sense that they
create or modify a legal relation, institution, or state of
affairs. Historically, there is a general progression from oral
legal act, to an oral act with a written record, to an
authoritative written text. Such authoritative texts differ from
speech and other types of writing in that they are more
autonomous. They tend to be drafted to be as clear and complete as
possible, embodying all relevant communicative intentions of the
author. Consequently, they are interpreted in a relatively literal
or decontextualized fashion. Moreover, they are generally regarded
as complete expressions of the author, making evidence of oral
statements outside of the text virtually irrelevant from a legal
point of view. Such consequences can be problematic for those with
limited experience with these conventions. Nonetheless,
authoritative legal texts can perform several useful functions,
such as marking a text as effectuating a binding legal act and
clearly delineating what is included within it and what is not.
Despite some drawbacks, as well as the impact of technological
change, it seems that the authoritative legal text is here to
stay.
Full Text
Gerald
R. McMenamin
Style
markers in authorship studies
ABSTRACT
The last issue of Forensic Linguistics presented two articles on
stylemarker selection in studies of questioned authorship. The
first paper (Chaski 2001) represents an interesting approach to
marker selection, but two significant weaknesses detract from its
purpose: it rejects virtually all previous work in stylistics,
hundreds studies representing more than a century of work, as
unscientific and irrelevant present forensic needs; and it is
founded on a theoretical position that views linguistic variation
as a feature of linguistic performance, thus missing the point of
the inherent variability of language. The second paper (Grant and
Baker 2001) hits the mark in three significant ways: it is a good
review of the style-marker issue; it recognizes that authorship
attribution must be based on an aggregate array of markers; and it
describes the statistical and linguistic bases of Principal
Component Analysis, a promising method for measuring the
collective range of variation needed for authorship
identification.
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Session: 18888
Forensic
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