Distinctive Features of Forensic Linguistic Examination of Modern Media Text
Elena I. Galyashina · Legal Linguistics · 2024
The article explores the features of forensic linguistic analysis of media texts, which is one of the most popular areas of research in the field of linguistics and law. It proposes to consider forensic examinations of media texts as a specific type of expert research, whose specificity is due to the heterogeneous semiotic nature of media texts and the role of expert opinion as evidence in legal proceedings. This determines special requirements for media texts as objects of forensic analysis, as well as the methods and techniques used to analyze them, and the skills of linguistic experts needed to address issues related to establishing the form and content of statements in mass com-munication, which are sources of criminal information. The article also discusses the correlation between specialized philological (linguistic) knowledge and legal knowledge in the context of fo-rensic analysis of media text. The author draws attention to the specific nature of the Internet me-dia texts, which include both verbal and non-verbal elements, collectively forming a semantic ori-entation in the semiotic space of interactive communication. These texts can be seen both as prod-ucts (traces) of human activity, containing potentially valuable information, and as artificial texts generated by artificial intelligence technologies. The article emphasizes that specialized linguistic knowledge cannot be limited to interpreting the definitions of individual words in dictionaries. Instead, it requires an understanding of the nature of media texts, combining semiotically diverse elements into a unified semantic space. This understanding also involves the ability to address ex-pert issues using a multi-modal approach to analyzing heterogeneous codes (text, image, sound). It is concluded that it is essential to develop a new approach to training linguistic experts in the field of studying media texts of both natural and artificial origins.