Rachel Wicaksono
Philip Thicknesse (1719-1792), British author and eccentric, with his chest cut open, revealing organs labeled cowardice, cruelty, defamation, disease, etc. First published: 15 December 1790 | Publisher: J. Aitken, No 14 Castle Street, Leicester Fields, UK | Source: Wikimedia Commons (1790-12-15)Language is both the medium for the law (statues, arrest warrants, the reading of rights etc.) and, potentially, a legal matter (either as evidence or as the actual subject matter of a case – such as in accusations of plagiarism, brand name disputes and defamation proceedings). In cases where language is the subject matter of a case, including where there is an accusation of written or spoken language as libellous, slanderous, blasphemous, racist, sexist or otherwise criminally obnoxious, it is normally the judge or jury who interpret the words used and who decide on the extent of their obnoxiousness. Sometimes, however, a linguist will be called as an expert witness.
But is something as commonplace and apparently straightforward as human language in need of expert testimony from applied linguists? As part of the York St John University English Language and Linguistics Colloquium series, in March 2011, Professor Alan Durant, of Middlesex University, UK, spoke about the difficult intersection between legal language and the courts' need to make sense of 'ordinary language'; giving examples from his own experience as an expert witness in a defamation trial.
Defamation is an intentional false communication, either written (libel) or spoken (slander), which harms a person's reputation. In the case described by Professor Durant, the plaintiff was a businessman who had been described as being 'economical with the truth' in a newspaper report. The businessman claimed that, in the context of the report, the phrase 'economical with the truth' suggested dishonourable concealment and misconduct, and therefore provided a threat to his professional reputation. The publishers of the report argued that the phrase could not be assumed to imply derogatory, and therefore libellous, meaning, and that it may even contain an element of praise for the plaintiff's actions.
So what did Professor Durant do? He searched a number of sources for evidence of the meaning of 'economical with the truth', including:
- literary concordances (for origins of the expression as a quotation, as well as influential early uses);
- the Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries and reference sources (for the historical development of and current conventions regarding its meanings);
- a transcript of relevant parts of the Spycatcher trial, held in Sydney in 1986 (for the context in which the expression was most famously used in recent times, in evidence by Sir Robert Armstrong);
- two corpora of English usage (one, an article search from the Financial Times Business Service covering the period 1983 - when the Service began – through to 1992; the other, the Survey of English Usage held at University College, London, which offers a large, representative body of English discourse for years prior to 1986;
- a sample of English-speaker informants (for patterns in speakers' intuitions about contemporary usage) for intuitions of English speakers.
(Durant, 1996 p. 2 - 3)
Professor Durant's evidence was no doubt a helpful contribution to the decision-making process of the court. So why is linguistic evidence generally in less demand than the evidence of other experts, such as DNA profilers? On p. 297 of Mapping Applied Linguistics in our chapter on Forensic Linguistics, we suggest that one reason is that courts may be reluctant to recognize that something which is as commonplace and as seemingly straightforward as language could be in need of expert testimony. Only specialists can tell the court whether two DNA samples match, but figuring out what ordinary words mean, well, anyone can do that, right??
This assumption is an example of what Chris has called the Language Spell; the way in which the many, complex tasks performed for us by language operate without any need for our conscious awareness. This lack of awareness means that 'common sense' beliefs about how language works, including what words mean, are widespread and often deeply held. Research and reflective practice by applied linguists can bring new perspectives to the problems faced, in this case, by a judge and jury. We would like to argue that it is the job of applied linguists (including forensic linguists) to avoid the 'dead ends' we describe in Chapter 1 and raise our clients' awareness of the possible role of language in any problems they may face.
Durant, A. (1996). 'On the interpretation of allusions and other innuendo meanings in libel actions: the value of semantic and pragmatic evidence', Forensic Linguistics, volume 3, number 2, pp. 195-210.
Monday, August 8, 2011 at 1:14PM 
Yantai University lecturers at York St John, August 2011Earlier this week, I taught a group of lecturers from Yantai University in China, specialists in English, Maths, Law, and Chemistry. The title of my session was Applied linguistics: What is it and why does it matter to teachers? In the session we considered five essential ingredients of applied linguistics: centrality of client needs; pragmatic orientation; social and cognitive embeddedness; role-shifting and collaboration; and mode of enquiry. For more on these ingredients, see Chapter 1 of Mapping applied linguistics: a guide for students and practitioners, available as a sample chapter on the companion website.
