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| TOPICS

The School addresses subjects within the broadly defined discipline of forensic linguistics. Generally speaking, it is concerned with the role, shape and evidential value of language in legal and forensic settings. We have covered the following topics throughout the School’s ten editions:

analysis of legal discourse,
structure and semantics of statutes and legal instruments,
legal terminology,
legal translation and interpreting,
speech style in the courtroom,
social organisation of conversation in legal settings,
structure of cross-examination,
sociopragmatic aspects of interpreting in court,
comprehensibility of legal instruments,
language and disadvantage before the law,
linguistic minorities and linguistic human rights,
forensic text analysis,
forensic phonetics,
trade name and domain name disputes.

The main topics of this year's introductory-level course will be forensic authorship analysis, contested meanings, investigative interviewing, and the role and status of the expert witness in cases where linguistic evidence is used. The programme will be posted here before 15 January 2012.

The advanced-level track will focus on how chosen areas of linguistics can inform forensic linguistic practice. We'll thus use insights from (critical) discourse analysis, pragmatics, semiotics, linguistics of the individual speaker, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. The programme will be posted here before 15 January 2012.