Current developments in forensic science: establishing the credibility of forensic linguistics through authorship analysis
Annette Putnam · UNI ScholarWorks (University of Northern Iowa) · 2014
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It is a science that is nearly 3000 years old and Harvard’s Department of Linguistics (Department of Linguistics, 2014, para. 1) considers it to be the “ultimate interdisciplinary enterprise.” Linguistics is divided into two parts: theoretical and applied. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics are considered the core of theoretical linguistics. The foci of applied linguistics, on the other hand, includes the importance of looking at language-related problems, the nature of language, and language’s nature in society. Applied linguistics, while once aimed at solving only problems within second language learning has come to address the intersection between language theory and language practice. Presently, there are extremely young fields that did not exist 40 years ago, such as language acquisition, neurolinguistics, and the focus here, forensic linguistics (Shuy, 2001). The aim of this paper is to establish the credibility of forensic linguistics by examining criminal cases involving anonymous or disputed texts of authorship that have been solved through linguistic analysis. By discussing where forensic linguistics and its methodology began and where it is advancing, its reliability as a forensic science will be better recognized.