FOR60320/FOR6032 - The Fundamentals of Forensic Linguistics

(3 units)

This course covers basic concepts in forensic linguistics, including a brief history of the field and the contexts in which it has been applied, such as author identification, discourse analysis, forensic phonetics, linguistic dialectology, and plagiarism detection. Case examples that include death threats and suicide letters, valid and false confessions, authorship investigations, and perjury will be surveyed to illustrate the use of forensic linguistics in criminal and civil court proceedings, investigations, and intelligence. Considerations related to forensic linguistics and the judicial process, such as admissibility under Frye and Daubert standards and the contexts in which forensic linguists have served as consultants to the justice system to support comprehensibility of a range of legal issues by laypersons both in the United States and internationally, will also be examined.