Overview on Forensic Linguistics

Definition
As a branch of Applied Linguistics, forensic linguistics taking linguistic knowledge and methods and applying these to the forensic context of law, investigation, trial, and punishment.

The 3 main areas of application for linguists working in forensic contexts are;

• understanding language of the written law,
• understanding language use in forensic and legal processes
• the condition of linguistic evidence 

Forensic Linguist in Action

Scope of Study 
According to Forensic Linguistics expert, Dr. Carole E. Chaski :Forensic Linguistics applies the theories and builds analytical methods of linguistics to question the civil, criminal and security investigation

In addition, Forensic Linguists are involved in areas that relate to crime, both solving crime and assisting wrongly accused people.

Some of these areas include:

• Voice identification - determining whether the voice on a threatening tape recording was that of the defendant;  also called forensic phonetics.
• Author identification - determining who wrote a particular text by comparing it to known writing samples of a suspect; sometimes also called forensic stylistics.
• Discourse analysis - analyzing the structure of writing or spoken discourse, often recorded, to help determine issue.
• For example : whether a suspect is agreeing to engage in a criminal conspiracy or he is forced to do so.

Everything is useful in solving crimes, even words!

Corpus
 Corpora that are available in forensic linguistic;

- Ransom notes                                - Suicide notes

- Threatening letters                         - Missing Person

- Anonymous letters                         - Examination Fraud

- Plagiarism

Application to Language Research 
The  application of Forensic Linguistics in language research  are :

                1. Author/speaker identification

                2. Intertextuality

                3. Text typing

                4. Linguistic profiling