When a Lawyer Needs a Linguist...

By Alan M. Perlman.

When does a lawyer need a linguist? As Roger Shuy, one of the most pre-eminent forensic linguists, has observed, the interpretation and application of the law are overwhelmingly about language. Thus, there are many situations in which the expertise of a linguist – someone trained in the precise description and analysis of language (but not necessarily a person who knows many languages) – can make substantial contributions to a case, providing evidence one way or the other or simply clarifying the linguistic principles, problems, and processes that the case involves.

Here are some of legal specialties in which linguistic expertise can prove valuable to the attorney

(1) Patent/copyright law. A linguist’s insight into semantics – specifically, the relationship between form and meaning (and especially the differences between denotative and connotative meaning) – can shed light on the question of whether or not a case can be made for copyright/trademark infringement.

The legal classification of trademarks as generic or descriptive involves just such an analysis of form and meaning; in some cases of alleged infringement, the linguist may be asked to provide an expert opinion as to the status of a word or expression in the language (and thus its [non-]protectability as a trade/service mark).

In other cases, the linguist may be called upon to objectively evaluate the similarities between brand names and to opine whether the similarities are sufficient to cause consumer confusion, such that one mark could be mistaken for the other.

(2) Intellectual property. Although elaborate computer software exists to ferret out plagiarism, the linguist’s trained eye can be very effective in assessing the likelihood that similarities – and/or the number of similarities -- between two texts are (or are not) coincidental.

Some plagiarists, if they do not lift directly, may attempt to disguise their theft.  A linguist can determine whether and how a text has been tampered with in order to create the impression of originality.

Of course, the Internet and Web have exponentially complicated the issues surrounding suspected plagiarism, and questions of whether an idea and/or the expression of it may be “in the public domain” become quite complex.

(3) Malpractice. Here the forensic linguist has a role to play in cases involving incriminating documents and emails. It is often in the interest of one side or the other to prove that a specific individual did or did not write a particular work order, medical report, memo, or other document.

In malpractice cases, as in other legal specialties below, the linguist’s qualitative analysis can describe the similarities and differences between two texts and assess the significance of these features and their patterns of variation.

(4) Civil litigation.In cases that involve threats, forgeries, defamation, partnership disputes, breach of contract, and other communications between parties, the attorney often finds anonymous, disputed, or questioned documents. The linguist’s insight into linguistic features and their usage can implicate suspected authors – or perhaps rule them out.

(5) Probate. The linguist’s insight into semantics and language structure can help clarify the meaning (or, in some cases, confirm the ambiguity) of a will, testament, or other document involved in probate litigation.

(6) Criminal litigation. Once again, the linguist’s understanding of individual writing style comes into play when he/he is asked to comment on the authorship of threats, suicide notes, ransom notes, and other documents involved in criminal cases. The linguist can often spot signals that the speaker/writer uses English as a second language. Inferences about age, education, and other characteristics are also possible.

Similarly, law enforcement authorities may draw upon the linguist’s knowledge of dialects and accents in order to gain information about the author of a particular document or the speaker in a sample of recorded speech.

(7) Contracts.In disputes involving contracts and other written agreements, parties may disagree about the meaning of particular words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. The linguist can analyze the various possible interpretations and assess the plausibility of each.

(8) Employee/labor law. Attorneys may need a linguist to examine and offer an opinion on the authorship and meaning of documents and emails involved in contracts, employer policies, terminations, anonymous complaints and threats, and other documents generated by the contentious atmosphere in many workplaces.

I was once asked to give my opinion on the authorship of anonymous letters of complaint to a corporation’s Board of Directors. In one of the anonymous letters and in a sample from a suspect writer, I found the same feature – a feature which simply does not occur in American English. Unfortunately, such egregious clues are rare.

Though the term “forensic linguistics” covers a wide variety of disciplines, some involving computers and statistics, the qualitative analysis described here, although perhaps not as well known as handwriting and document analysis in the popular imagination or within the legal community, has a long and honorable history.

According to Gerald R. McMenamin (Forensic Linguistics: Advances in Forensic Stylistics, pp. 86-7),

...hundreds of studies – in the form of journal articles and books – have been done on style, stylistics, and questioned authorship. German studies of Old Testament authorship date back at least to the middle of the 19th century. In addition, evidence has been presented in multiple court cases, and numerous judicial opinions have been documented based on evidence of forensic stylistics.

These cases date as far back as the 1728 Trial of William Hales in England and the 1846 Pate v. People case in the US.

Why does forensic linguistics work? Because linguists have learned to examine and describe language at a level of exactitude unimaginable to the layperson – who is generally not even aware of his/her linguistic habits at all. That’s why I never tell anyone what features I look for – unless it’s the attorney for whom I’m writing a report.

By Alan M. Perlman. All rights reserved. © 2009

Alan is quoted in the Washington Post.

June 13, 2004, Sunday

WASHINGTON POST

A LINGUAL PARADIGM SHIFT

By Amy Joyce

Susannah Rast got a letter from her employer at the beginning of the year that said the company was "implementing a reduction in force to your position."Not only did her boss not say she was being let go, but it was additionally laughable because this "reduction in force" was in an office of just 12 people. And she was the only one let go.

Management-speak. Buzzwords. Lingo. They can be the bane of office existence.Check out the wording in Primus Knowledge Solutions Inc.'s first-quarter report (pointed out to me by one of the company's annoyed employees): ". . . related to the company's March 2004 restructuring of its workforce and operations in an effort to realize efficiencies and synergies from its recent acquisition." Translation: layoffs in the company we just bought.

Why do managers and executives decide this is a good way to use the English language? In the two cases above, it just seems that employers are trying to proceed beyond (skip, ignore, hide) the transitional information (bad news).There have always been catchwords and phrases. Today, however, a lot of them are corporate, workplace words.

It's a topic often broached in the Dilbert comic strip. There are several Web sites dedicated to management-speak, including www.buzzwhack.com. "There's so much Dilbertese out there, and it has permeated our language so much that we don't even flinch anymore!" wrote Jessica Gentile Riley, a recent Georgetown business school graduate who is currently looking for a job. "I think these words sometimes come up because there's no other better word for what is happening. Concepts like 'prairie-dog-ing' [peeking out over cubicles] didn't exist 100 years ago because there were no cubicles then," she said. One woman who e-mailed me said she and her mother, who work at different organizations, hear two different buzzwords to describe budget cuts. My correspondent works for an Ohio university, which calls the cuts "strategic budgeting" (when is figuring a budget out not strategic?) and her mother's company's term is -- wait for it -- "The Lean Initiative." (I'm sure if it hasn't already happened, the managers will soon be tossing "TLI" around. "No coffee at the meeting today, folks. You know -- TLI!")

The most obvious use of management-speak happened last week when George Tenet resigned from the CIA to "spend more time with his family." Between that and "leaving to pursue other options," no one gets fired anymore. "Have you ever heard of someone taking a job to spend less time with their family?" asked Paul J.J. Payack, founder of the Global Language Monitor, a Web site that tracks mostly Hollywood and political buzzwords. "Officially, people pursue other options. Everybody knows what that means. That means you have been fired."The reason these words infiltrate our world is to keep up public relations, Payack said.

A company's executive team or public relations department uses catchphrases because they don't want to create a crisis. "They want it to sound palatable." And, perhaps more so, they simply want to sound smart, said Alan Perlman, a linguist and speechwriter based in Highland Park, Ill. Executives and other workplace leaders are "obsessed with innovation," he said."It's the only way to sustain a competitive advantage," Perlman said. "New words are very important to them."But innovation implies progress or improvement, said Geoffrey Nunberg, author of "Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversial Times" and a Stanford University linguist. And he's not so sure words like these are a measure of progress.

However, the words do change with new management. "It's clear that every generation, there is a lot of pressure to come up with new words and coinings. Every generation of management wants to sweep clean. It also comes from the consultants because they can't say, 'We want to sell you what we sold you last year.' " We all know and complain about management-speak, and yet we all use it, he said. Including Nunberg himself.

When he first worked for Xerox Corp. years ago, he received a memo that asked him to "cascade this to your people and see what the pushback is." "I would use the words myself in that life, then come home and do this job," he said. "A parallel language has developed. These are words we don't use for ordinary life. You don't say to your partner, 'Can we align our vision?' "

Granted, some of the management-speak has seeped into our everyday language. Our friends no longer have problems, nor are they nutty. They "have issues." And no more are our kids hyper and hard to handle. They are "a challenge." In fact, "challenge" has become a catchall for all things bad. "Something horrible that happens is 'a challenge.' A bad -- no, horrible -- year is a 'challenging' year. . . . It's the one-stop word that avoids all the icky stuff," said Patrick Cleary, senior vice president of human resource policy at the National Association of Manufacturers. "The interesting thing is that as a communications specialist, I understand the absurdity of that," Payack said. "People think others don't see through it. If we explain it the right way, Wall Street is going to buy it. If we explain it the right way, employees are going to buy it." And buy it, we all have. How many times have you, as a manager, talked about a "paradigm shift," or asked your "team members" or "associates" to "think outside the box." Or discussed a "personnel challenge," where, again, you may be impelled to "implement a reduction in force?" "Everybody is aware of it. Everybody knows it's going on. Management makes fun of itself," Nunberg said. "Yet they use the language. And yet it does its job."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

The Language of "The Passion"

If we can set aside, just for a moment, our passions about "The Passion," we can view it as a movie with some really good linguistic special effects.

Below is the full text version of an article entitled "The Jesuit scholar who translated 'The Passion'" (by Nathan Bierma, Special to the Tribune. Chicago Tribune, Mar 4, 2004). The footnote numbers refer to my comments at the end.

Obscured by the furor surrounding Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" is one relatively mundane bit of trivia: Last week's debut marked the widest release ever of a subtitled film in North America.

The subtitles were actually Plan B. Gibson originally intended to show the movie without them, letting the sound of the Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin - not to mention the spattering blood - speak for itself.

"He was real hard-set against them," said Alan Nierob, Gibson's publicist. "He initially thought they would be a distraction .... It's a very visual movie."

Gibson also wanted to avoid the phony air of British English¹ that has plagued so many film renditions of the life of Jesus Christ, Nierob said.

For clarity

But after early screenings of the film without subtitles, Gibson decided to insert them for the sake of clarity.

"I'm glad he did," Nierob said. "It is a better movie with them. I've seen it both ways, and it's great [either way], but it's much better with subtitles, I felt."

The task of achieving linguistic authenticity fell to Rev. William Fulco, a Jesuit priest and professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Gibson got Fulco's name from Yale University, where Fulco received a doctorate and taught Aramaic.

"I got a call while I was in Jerusalem: 'Hey, Padre, It's Mel, I got a job for you,"' Fulco said. "I said, 'Mel who?' We talked for about an hour. He told me about the project, and I couldn't pass it up."

In 2002, Gibson gave Fulco the script written by Benedict Fitzgerald, mostly derived from the Gospels, and asked Fulco to translate it into Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin. Fulco later translated the script back into English subtitles.

The use of multiple languages in the film reflects the linguistic diversity of Palestine during Jesus' life. Most people spoke Aramaic, which the Jews adopted while exiled in Babylon in the 6th Century before Jesus' birth. Hebrew, their language before the exile, was retained in religious writings and liturgy (and is spoken by Jesus in prayer in "The Passion"). Latin was spoken by the Roman soldiers occupying the region. Greek was spoken throughout the Roman Empire, thanks to Alexander the Great, but was seen as a sign of secularization and thus resisted by many Jews.

Fulco left Greek out of "The Passion," substituting Latin in occasional cases where Greek might have been used.² He also made mostly imperceptible distinctions between the elegant Latin of Pilate and the crude Latin of soldiers, thanks to an X-rated source he found on his shelf.³

"I tracked down some obscene graffiti from Roman army camps," Fulco said. "Somebody who knows Latin really well, their ears will fall off. We didn't subtitle those words."

Fulco even confessed to some linguistic mischief.

"Here and there I put in playful things which nobody will know. There's one scene where Caiaphas turns to his cohorts and says something in Aramaic. The subtitle says, 'You take care of it.' He's actually saying, 'Take care of my laundry."'

Other linguistic tricks of Fulco's serve a function in the script.

For example, he incorporated deliberate dialogue errors⁴ in the scenes where the Roman soldiers, speaking Aramaic, are shouting to Jewish crowds, who respond in Latin. To illustrate the groups' inability to communicate with each other, each side speaks with incorrect pronunciations and word endings.

Later, "there's an exchange where Pilate addresses Jesus in Aramaic, and Jesus answers in Latin. It's kind of a nifty little symbolic thing: Jesus is going to beat him at his own game,"⁵ Fulco said. "One line [in that exchange] I kind of enjoyed is when Jesus says, 'My power is given from above, otherwise my followers would not have allowed this.' That's [spoken in] the pluperfect subjunctive."

Appreciating the niceties

It takes a linguist to appreciate that grammatical nicety as remarkable for being uttered by a Palestinian Jew who mostly spoke Aramaic and Greek.

For the relatively few Middle Eastern Christians who still speak Aramaic, "The Passion" may sound riddled with mistakes - spurring Fulco to point out, "modern Aramaic dialects are as different [from ancient ones] as Chaucer and modern English."⁶

Still, now that the movie is in general release, Fulco fully expects to get an earful about his use of languages.

"We linguists are a crazy bunch," he said. "The more obscure the language, the more people try to prove their territory worthwhile and say, by God, we're going to sniff out errors."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Alan's comments:

(1) Good decision. The use of British English in so many old movies made the Romans and other ancient peoples seem powerful and imperial - the way the British themselves were - but let's face it, the Romans did not sound like that. They didn't speak English at all, let alone British English. And it's a sure bet they didn't always sound stiff and formal to each other, either.

(2) A compromise, but I doubt that anybody noticed.

(3) A brilliant bit of authenticity, and, as Fulco observes, a few people will actually notice.

(4) Another brilliant bit of authenticity.

(5) This is too much of a stretch. Now Fulco is improvising on the original. How can we know whether Jesus had that level of mastery of Latin? Or any level of mastery?

(6) He's right. The same thing applies to English. For most modern speakers of English, any movie that takes place before about 1600 would require subtitles even if the actors are speaking English. The language of all movies that take place in medieval England would be completely unintelligible to us.

What does this all have to do with forensic linguistics?

One type of forensic linguistics that I practice - forensic stylistics - is all about authenticity. In analyzing a forged, disputed, or questionable document, I try to discern the hallmarks of the writer's style. Fulco did the same thing in reverse: he tried to create authenticity by drawing on what he knew about the use of language in the ancient world.

Do men and women write differently? Read "Sexed Texts" -- and Alan's comments.

MAGAZINE DESK

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 8-10-03; Sexed Texts

By Charles McGrath (NYT) 1113 words

Men -- as we know now, thanks to investigators like Dr. John Gray -- are from Mars, women from Venus. On our respective planets we, or our ancestors, learned to do certain things differently: shop, argue, deploy the TV clicker. To this ever-expanding list we must now add writing. Not writing in the literal sense of making marks on a page -- though clearly there are vast differences there as well (legibility must be more prized on Venus) -- but writing as linguistic expression. This is slightly different from conversation, in which, as Deborah Tannen, another of the scholars in the Venus-Mars debate, has taught us, the differences between men and women are so vast as to be almost unbridgeable without years of therapy.

Men and women ostensibly write the same language, on the other hand, but according to a recent article in The Boston Globe, they do so in ways that immediately reveal which sex is doing the writing. A team of Israeli scientists, the Globe article reports, punched into a computer some 600 published documents and devised an algorithm that could predict with 80 percent accuracy the sex of the author.

Let's try this at home. Here are two passages chosen more or less at random from current magazines: Passage A: ''I was dating this guy who came from a very wealthy family, and I always felt a little uncomfortable about my humble roots. For his parents' 25th-wedding anniversary, the family had planned a black-tie party at a ritzy hotel. I was nervous about it, but Alex told me he had everything under control. Before the event, he took me shopping and brought me a beautiful gown. The night of the party, he even rented a limo so we could arrive in style. Alex was a perfect gentleman and treated me like a princess the entire night. He even waltzed with me!''

Passage B: ''Ironwood RC-660. . . . Smokejumpers swear by it. You can finally haul that 1,800-pound keg. Whatever the emergency, this American Gladiators-looking tank can handle it. Options include a 75-gallon liquid tank and bullet-resistant enclosure. . . . Honda FourTrax Rancher AT GPScape. . . . No other ATV offers a longer name or a standard GPS system, which helps determine if you're ripping through Amazon rain forests, shredding the Sahara or tearing up a neighbor's lawn.''

A no-brainer, right? A is from Venus, B is from Mars. Yes, but not for the reasons you think. When the Israeli stylometricans, as they call themselves, study a text, they scrub it clean of everything that's ''topic specific'' -- in other words, no ''gown,'' no ''princess,'' no ''keg,'' no ''bullet-resistant.'' This is how sophisticated language analysts work these days. They ignore the obvious stuff and concentrate instead on the seemingly unobtrusive little tics that the writer and reader barely notice. The process is a little like identifying Tom Wolfe by ignoring his suits and his spats and concentrating instead on his socks, but it gets results. Seven years ago, for example, Donald Foster, the Vassar English professor and self-styled ''forensic linguist,'' fingered Joe Klein as the author of ''Primary Colors'' from Klein's use of punctuation and adverbs.

Similarly, what the gender-identifying algorithm picks up on is that women are apparently far more likely than men to use personal pronouns -- ''I,'' ''you'' and ''she'' especially. Men, on the other hand, prefer so-called determiners -- ''a,'' ''the,'' ''that,'' ''these'' -- along with numbers and quantifiers like ''more'' and ''some.'' What this suggests, according to Moshe Koppel, an author of the Israeli project, is that women are more comfortable talking or thinking about people and relationships, while men prefer to contemplate things.

But from the same magazine where I found Passage B, I could also have selected the following: ''As the sun sets on a spectacularly gorgeous Miami day, a crowd of people strolling along the Atlantic Ocean coastline are overwhelmed with the same feeling. They've gathered to witness a once-in-a-lifetime scene as a beauty crawls out of the frigid ocean water onto the warm sand. Given the attention, you'd assume the passers-by may have stumbled onto a real, live mermaid. This event, however, was far more memorable -- a Carmen Electra photo shoot.'' That writer certainly sounds like a people person to me. And how about this, from the ostensibly Venusian magazine: ''Hardware detailing is really big this season, and the buckles make these jeans a little edgy and rock and roll.'' Kind of thingy, wouldn't you say?

Tannen suggests that children's conversational styles begin to differ almost as soon as children begin to socialize, and linguistic differences may go back even earlier. When my daughter was an infant, my wife kept a detailed scrapbook recording her development and proudly noted that by 22 months, for instance, she had already mastered most of the subordinating conjunctions -- ''when,'' ''if,'' ''because'' and even ''unless.'' When our son came along, three years later, my wife was alarmed to discover that he had little interest in conjunctions, other than ''and,'' but had instead amassed a formidable inventory of nouns, starting with ''lawn mower.'' Both children, thank goodness, are now happy and well adjusted, but had we known enough at the time, we probably could have turned them into test cases. She, presumably, was a Venusian, interested in relationships; he was a Martian, collecting information.

But what planet are those Israeli stylometricians from, spending so much effort trying to prove something that they could have learned from looking at bylines and author photographs? It would be surprising if our prose did not reveal something about who we are -- something more interesting, in fact, than our sexes -- and the place to look is precisely at those ''topic specific'' references that the programmers have so scientifically ignored. You like waltzing; I like A.T.V.'s. Once we get that established, then maybe we can start to communicate.

Alan's comments:

(1) Author McGrath is correct in his lukewarm assessment of the Israeli scientists' research. The "stylometricians" say they can identify, with 80% accuracy, the gender of the author. If pure guesswork produces 50% accuracy, how much of an improvement have they really achieved?

(2) Another reason why the Israeli study is underwhelming: The words that are supposedly more likely in the writing of one gender or another are determined by the content of what the writer's writing about. McGrath notes that "sophisticated language analysts... ignore the obvious stuff [i.e., the content-words] and concentrate instead on the seemingly unobtrusive little tics that the writer and reader barely notice." He's right -- this is indeed one of the fundamental methods of forensic linguistic analysis.

So the stylometricians ignored content words - but they focused on words that are content determined. Not much of an improvement, methodology-wise. As McGrath correctly notes, a personal essay by a man would very likely use the personal pronouns, whereas a piece of descriptive writing by a woman would not.

(3) The study introduces further confusion by comparing apples and oranges (or, as the British like to say, chalk and cheese): in a linguistic sense, the personal pronouns don't contrast with the "so-called determiners" -- in other words, we don't use one as opposed to the other. Forensic authorship analysis rests squarely on this kind of contrastive choice. No contrast, no conclusion.

(4) I have the highest respect for the work of linguist Deborah Tannen, but her conclusions on children's conversational styles are irrelevant to any assessment of the validity of the Israeli study, which examined printed works.

(5) Don Foster may be a "self-styled forensic linguist," but he is not a forensic linguist. He draws all kinds of indirect literary parallels on the basis of inferred puns and allusions, subconscious references and associations, and other matters that real linguists do not deal with. He psychologizes about his subjects.

Also, as Professor Gerald McMenamin has pointed out (in Forensic Linguistics: Advances in Forensic Stylistics), Foster becomes fascinated with his own media glory (whereas in reality he's just a classic case of being in the right place at the right time, with his identification of a new Shakespearean sonnet just when a lot of people were wondering about the author of Primary Colors); he changes his conclusion according to circumstances (instead of gathering data to confirm or support a hypothesis); he gets the linguistics wrong; and, worst of all, he takes credit for inventing a field that was already hundreds of years old and had been used in many legal cases.

Forensic linguistics, correctly practiced, is part art and part science. As Roger Shuy (the academic "dean" of forensic linguistics) has pointed out, it is good linguistics practiced within a legal context. What I report to my clients is not literary or abstruse. It involves specific linguistic data and my impartial evaluation of them.

(6) If anybody knows of linguistic features that reliably (i.e., independently of style, context, and content) differentiate male from female language, please e-mail me at alan@languagedetective.com and enlighten me.

FAQ's about forensic linguistics (from Forensic Linguistics: Advances in Forensic Stylistics, by Gerald R. McMenamin, CRC Press, 2002).

Q: What is the role of the analyst's intuition?

A: Intuition is the analyst's use of his or her own judgment to discover linguistic variation and suggest initial hypotheses to investigate. As a speaker or writer of the language and as a linguist, the analyst uses introspection to start the process of analysis. Lakoff comments, on the use of introspection and informal observation that, "... any procedure is at some point introspective..." (Lakoff, 19705:5). A good discussion of the methodological role of intuition in linguistic research can be found in B. Johnstone, Qualitative Methods in Sociolinguistics, Oxford University Press, New York, 2000.

Q: Are [the linguist's] qualitative statements impressionistic?

A: This [question] is also asked in other ways: Is not qualitative analysis objective and quantitative [i.e., statistical] analysis objective?...[S]tylistic analyses are both qualitative and quantitative, but the description of written language is the first and most important means for discovering style variation [and identifying the writer of a document]. The focus of a qualitative study of writing is a systematic linguistic description of what forms are used by a writer and how and why they may be used.

Q: What is the process of argumentation?

A: The scientific basis of the argument is that of any empirical study: observation, description, measurement, and conclusion. In the specific case of authorship studies, the argument is as follows:

• Notice these style-markers in the corpus of writing. . . .
  
  
• Each of these markers has x probability of occurring in the writing of the speech community.
  
  
• Taken as an aggregate set, they have y probability of occurring together in one writer.
  
  
• The author-specific markers and their joint probability of occurrence are either the same as or the same as or different from those of comparison corpus of writing.

Q: Does the [linguist] look for exculpatory characteristics?

A: Whether certain evidence is incriminating or exculpatory is the concern of the client and the trier of fact, not the expert witness. The linguist analyzes the writings presented for both similarities and differences vis-a-vis the comparison writings, then states his or her findings, conclusions, and opinions. The linguist's participation usually stops there if the evidence is not consistent with the expectations of the client. The linguist may testify at deposition or in court if it is the case that his or her evidence supports the client's position.

A Note on the Origins of Forensic Linguistics

Although it employs the methods and concepts of modern linguistics (and sometimes makes use of statistical analysis and computer databases), forensic linguistics is at least 200 years old.

According to Gerald R. McMenamin (Forensic Linguistics: Advances in Forensic Stylistics), "hundreds of studies -- in the form of journal articles and books -- have been done on style, stylistics, and questioned authorship. German studies of Old Testament authorship date back at least to the middle of the 19th century. In addition, evidence has been presented in multiple court cases, and numerous judicial opinions have been documented based on evidence of forensic stylistics.

These cases date as far back as the 1728 Trial of William Hales in England and the 1846 Pate v. People case in the US (pp. 86-7)."

To apply the tools of forensic linguistics to your case, please contact Alan Perlman, Ph.D., at 847.433.8569, or via email.

Basic Forensic Linguistic Skills: How Text Sensitive Are You?

A forensic linguist must be exquisitely sensitive to nuances of text.  Where a synonym exists, the very choice of each word represents a decision on the part of the author.  Superimposed upon that is the way toward is spelled, abbreviated or capitalized. Truly, a text is a tangle of choices.

The following are intended to test your potential as a forensic linguist. There are two exercises from Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language, Crime and the Law, by John Olsson (New York: Continuum, 2004).

(1) From page 193:

Note ALL peculiarities in the following text.

This chapter is about the improving of your forensic skills. Your first and foremost important skill is the observation of text, whether written or spoken, wether text or numbers, such such as the sum of $123,453.78.  What this necessitates is, in the first instance, the ability to observe what it is a text is comprised of, and secondly, the ability to transcribe text with total accurately. Your need to be very aware of any idiosyncrasies the writer has, such as unconventual spellings, capitalizing, underlinings, ect. It is necessary to honour the text.

You should have found at least five.  Feel free to email me with the correct answers.

(2) From page 195:

Below are two versions of a speech by Nelson Mandela.   The second, according to Olsson, is more accurate, because it was taken directly from a recording. Note at least four important differences (and email them to me).

(a) During my lifetime dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. Is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

(b) During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people.  I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized.  But, my lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Beyond "Fun" linguistics: The Deconstruction of BS and the Search for Truth

I suppose I should not be shocked by the trivialization, in the popular view, of the discipline to which I devoted so many years of my life and still consider myself a practitioner: linguistics -- the objective, scientific study of language. I'm not surprised because many sciences get trivialized. The ongoing search for knowledge of nutrition spawns health fads and new diets galore. The data of biology and astrophysics are twisted to support crackpot theories of creationism. The bewilderingly complex study of climate change is as polluted by politics and emotion as the environment is itself polluted with human, toxic waste.

Fun Stuff

So I’m not surprised that mostly all the public sees of linguistics is what I call "fun" or "schoolmarm" linguistics. 

Yes, there have been very insightful books on verbal self-defense by Suzette Haden Elgin, as well as much useful language study by Deborah Tannen.  Other than that, linguists are silent, except for the irrepressible Chomsky, one of the most overrated minds of all time (though I agree with much of his criticism of American imperialism). 

What we see in “fun” linguistics is not serious pursuit of the truth via the tools of linguistics…but cocktail party chatter.  Fun linguistics is preoccupied with questions such as...

-- Which of two expressions is correct (or “more correct”?)
-- Where did this word or expression come from?
-- What is the trajectory of the current cliché or buzzword?
-- What slogan or saying has this or that celebrity made popular (e.g., throw under the bus)?
-- What are the many meanings of this word or phrase?

That's all I ever see.  It's fun stuff, doesn't hurt anybody or ruffle any feathers. William Safire has made a second livelihood out of it, and more power to him.  But he is not the only language maven in the land.

Path to Truth

What about linguistics not as a source of cocktail party chatter... or as a way to play linguistic "gotcha" games of correctness and one-upmanship -- but as a legitimate branch of knowledge, as the search for truth? 

What do the facts of language tell us about ourselves and the way we shape our world and manipulate each other?  If the subjects are never discussed, then all the bullshit and manipulation can continue unquestioned, and for some people that is unquestionably a good thing.

It is good to keep certain kinds of knowledge from people. 

Three of the properties of language to which most people are quite blind are the ability to talk about things that are not there; the ability to assign multiple labels to the same reality; and the ability to comprehend multiple realities under one label (i.e., have different meanings), depending on one's feelings and perspective. 

From this it follows that the meaning of a phrase or word is what the speaker/writer intends it to be, provided that this meaning is also understood by the audience.  Many factors go into it, but communication is a two-way street.

BTW, I’m also a big fan of sentence diagramming, a lost art.  It really helps you to see what a string of words means.  It’s beneficial to persuaders of all kinds – clerics, politicians, marketers – for people to have limited discernment in this matter (just as the case for evolution is best kept secret from fundamentalists), and indeed they do.  Any plausible-sounding string of words is assumed to have some meaning, when all too often is it nothing more than a string of feel-good words (e.g., most New Age psychobabble).

Essence of BS

One of the simple intellectual techniques is that manipulators -- notably, politicians, marketers, and clerics -- would rather not be widespread... it is the ability to determine the meaningfulness of the sentence.  You would think that would be quite a simple matter.  Just decipher the grammar, figure out what each word means, and you’ve got it.

It doesn’t work that way in actual practice.  Some of the sentences we compose have multiple meanings or even contradict themselves... or have no meaning at all.  They may refer to entities that do not exist.

Yet -- and this is the important point -- they all SOUND as if they have meaning -- they may be completely grammatical -- and so one assumes that they indeed are meaningful, without applying the simple techniques of attention to words and what, if anything, they refer to in the real world.

This brings us to the essence of bullshit: the skillful intermingling of the language about the unreal (or, alternatively, vague abstractions) with language about the real, thus confusing an imaginary, subjective, fantasy world with the actual one of common experience.

By this criterion, much or most of the language of advertising, religion, and politics is bullshit.  It slides by so effortlessly, because simple techniques of understanding language -- and thus understanding when it goes awry -- are simply not part of the public curriculum.

The Best

You don’t have to be an academic in order to make incisive observations about language.

For decades I have admired George Carlin in his many incarnations.  I remember him on the Johnny Carson Show as a fast-talking newscaster and as Al Sleet, The Hippy-Dippy Weather Man (“Tomorrow’s high – whenever I get up, man.”).

The Seven Words routine was classic.  Years ago I played it in my linguistics classes to teach that they’re just words.  Typically, one or two students would walk out.

Of course, I, as an academic/practical linguist, appreciate Carlin’s linguistic genius most of all his talents. 

Years ago, I was astonished by Lenny Bruce’s boldness.   He was right.  They’re just WORDS.

Regrettably, we have made little progress, and there were always plenty of targets for Carlin’s brilliant wit and laser logic.  Especially about taboo words.

Here’s a great summary of Carlin as linguist:

http://reason.com/news/show/127137.html

I could hardly improve on that, but I can elaborate a bit on Carlin's linguistic genius.  His cleansing truth about words and meanings has done humanity more good than all the politicians in Washington combined (and their sniveling media flacks).  Throw in all the academic linguists too. 

Iconoclasts and challengers of the taboo, especially language taboos, are needed now, as they always have been. They're just WORDS. 

I for one would like to see people chill out about fuck and let it, in its many uses, add to the expressiveness of the language.  If you really want to fucking emphasize a word, there's no better way to do it...or to show your displeasure and disrespect (a "fucking idiot" is worse than a mere "idiot"). 

The usage of this word alone, with its taboos (it's just a WORD), would fill a book and probably has.  It’s a great linguistic resource.  It’s even an infix (“un-fucking-believable!”

The Truth

George Carlin did his share of fun linguistics and weird language questions…but he went WAY beyond that to tell the truth about the way we give people, through words, far too much power over us.

The tide of bullshit continues to rise, but Carlin’s statue will never be washed away.  He told the truth.