CORPUS DELICTI

A Corpus of Forensic Linguistics Cases

A Corpus of Forensic Linguistics Cases – Compiled by TFG STUDENTS AT THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT UGR

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«Por la boca muere el malo», un blog de Sheila Queralt sobr LF

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«Por la boca muere el malo» es un blog divulgativo sobre Lingüística Forense realizado por Sheila Queralt, sin duda la principal exponente y practicante de esta rama de la Lingüística en España y fundadora de SQ Linguistas Forenses, que aceptó nuestra invitación para impartir la conferencia «De profesión, lingüista forense», dentro de ciclo propio de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras «FYL INVESTIGA».

En el blog, la Dra. Queralt comenta casos de actualidad en los que la LF tiene un papel relevante y lo hace con un estilo ameno para captar la atención del lector y conseguir que se interese por esta rama de la Lingüística aún bastante desconocida en nuestro país. Algunas de las últimas entradas llevan títulos tan sugerentes como:

Etc., etc.

No olvides suscribirte al blog para recibir en tu correo una notificación siempre que haya una nueva publicación: puede hacerlo en el formulario disponible en cada entrada del blog.

 

«Por la boca muere el malo» está integrado en la plataforma Archiletras, descrito como «un medio global y panhispánico, impreso y digital, en torno a la lengua española» y que engloba diversos blogs y publicaciones en papel con la lengua española como eje vertebrador.

«Is there a language of fake news? Some answers from the Fakespeak project» (AIFL Seminar: 2/2/2023)

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Fake News

Title: Is there a language of fake news? Some answers from the Fakespeak project

Speaker: Dr Nele Põldvere (University of Oslo)

Date and time: Thu, February 2, 2023, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM GMT  (This is an online talk taking place on Microsoft Teams. The link to join will be sent out on the day of the talk.)

Link for reservations

Organized by: Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics

Abstract:

In this talk, I will present some findings from a large project on the language of fake news, called Fakespeak. The goal of the project is to find out whether or not fake news is characterised by a distinct set of linguistic features that would allow us to speak of a language of fake news. Research on this topic has gained much ground in other disciplines, such as computer science, but in linguistics, it is still quite new. Grieve and Woodfield (forthcoming) have taken important steps towards establishing a linguistically driven approach to fake news, one that is grounded in existing linguistic theory and where the data are of high quality, i.e., controlled for a number of variables. In the Fakespeak project, we add to their research by drawing on the linguistic theories of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) to determine the defining metaphorical and evaluative features of fake news, respectively. The data are of different kinds. We make use of the Jayson Blair corpus used in Grieve and Woodfield, but we have also built new corpora, both large and small, to be able to generalise our results to different types of fake news.

References

Grieve, J., & Woodfield, H. (forthcoming). The language of fake news. Cambridge Elements in Forensic Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago University Press.

Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.

FoLD: Forensic Linguistic Databank at Aston Institute

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The Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics (AIFL) has made publicly available its “Forensic Linguistic Databank” (F0LD),  a permanent, controlled access online repository for forensic linguistic data, including malicious communication data, investigative interview data, and forensic evidence validation data for both speech and text.

FoLD comprises a wide range of datasets with relevance to forensic linguistics and language and law, including commercial extortion letters, investigative interviews in police and other contexts, legal documents, forum posts from far-right online groups, and comment threads from political blogs.

The intention for the databank is to not only further academic research into forensic linguistics by developing new methods and approaches but also to directly contribute to impact in assisting the delivery of justice. Therefore, research projects using this data will validate methods for forensic analysis, further the effectiveness of interviewing techniques used by British police, and help tackle internet crime and abuse on behalf of law enforcement beneficiaries, such as the National Crime Agency.

Some recent additions to FoLD are:

  • The Shipman Inquiry ( the collection of all documents pertaining to the Shipman Inquiry, the trial for dr. Harold Fredrick Shipman, who was convicted at Preston Crown Court on 31 January 2000 of the murder of 15 of his patients and of one count of forging a will.
  • Pledges to Harm: 8 non-realized pledges to harm, where no real-world violence was attempted, totaling 1,552 words. 6 realized pledges to harm, where real-world violence was attempted, totaling 2,638 words. 10 of the 14 were authored between 2014-2016. The earliest text is from 1998. All are written in some variety of American English.
  • Threat letters transcribed data from the FBI: Vault (2021): Fifty threatening texts were obtained and transcribed from FBI vault.
  • Michelle Carter/Conrad Roy text messages: The series of text messages between Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy as submitted in evidence in the 2015-2017 trial ‘Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter’. Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The dataset includes references to suicide. The messages total 184 pages over 112 days (1st June 2014 to 21st September 2014).
  • Etc, Etc.

An invaluable resource to discover and document forensic linguistic cases: an absolute must for new TFGers.

New members of the Corpus Delicti Team

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Two new members have recently joined the Corpus Delicti Team of researchers.

Zayneb Dahhaoui (a.k.a. Yini) will be examining the case of Jonbénet Ramsey, an American child beauty queen who was killed at the age of six in her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado, where  a long handwritten ransom note was found, making this a perfect case for forensic linguists interested in authorship attibution.

 

Marta Gallardo Mora will be studying the case of Helena Jubany, a 7-year-old librarian who was found dead in Sabadell on 2 December 2001 after being thrown into an interior courtyard, naked and with several burns on her body; Helena had received mysterious “presents” which included hand-written notes. Marta will also address the “Prinzivalli case”, an airline employee, 39, who was arrested Feb. 16, 1984, while on duty at Pan Am’s cargo warehouse at Los Angeles International Airport, and charged by the Los Angeles County district attorney with making a series of false bomb threats to Pan Am flights.  Both cases involve authorship attribution but the triggering “documents” are of a different nature: hand-written notes vs telephone calls.

We can’t wait to see the promising results of our two new member’s investigations!!