Solving crime with linguistics

Forensic linguistics is a really fascinating area of language study, so this lecture by Dr Malcolm Coulthard, one of the daddies of the discipline, is well worth a look. Here he shows how linguistic analysis can be used to piece together the identity/ies of text message senders in criminal cases.

"I'll get da fiend to duppy her den"

Those are the words that led to two East Londoners getting sent down for lengthy prison sentences, and linguistics had a major part to play in getting them off the street and into a cell. An article in yesterday's Independent tells us more:

To give you the background: in December 2008, two months after the conversation above, the girl pregnant with Jolie's baby was lured by text to a spot close to the Regent's Canal in Islington, North London. There, Ogundele lay in wait to batter the girl over the head with an iron bar before throwing her in the waterway. Both the girl and the baby escaped alive, and the search turned to her assailant. After Ogundele and Jolie became prime suspects, their computers were seized. They had forgotten to delete their MSN history folders and police called in experts from the University of Aston's Centre for Forensic Linguistics. They helped decipher the boys' language, and the two rappers were sentenced for conspiracy to murder last month. Ogundele got 18 years in prison, Jolie, 14.

Forensic Linguistics is something we've looked at before (try here and here) and it's a fascinating area in which close study of people's language use can lead to the solving of some pretty unpleasant crimes. Last February, Krzysztof Kredens from the Centre for Forensic Linguistics did an excellent talk to SFX students about some of the cases in which forensic linguistics had been applied, and some of the techniques they have employed, and we're hoping to repeat this in the future. But in the meantime, the article itself is a good introduction to some of what they're up to. You can find out more about the work of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics here.

Liar, liar, your pen's on fire

Forensic linguistics is a great area of language study. You can find out more about the range of activities the forensic linguists at Aston University do from their site here, but one of its many uses is to work out if someone is telling the truth or is who they say they are. This brief article from Physorg looks at new research into handwriting and truthfulness and links it to how the brain works when telling lies.

In short, "The researchers analyzed the writing and discovered that in the untrue paragraphs the subjects on average pressed down harder on the paper and made significantly longer strokes and taller letters than in the true paragraphs".

CSI Nokia

Forensic linguistics is a growing field and one that directly applies skills of textual analysis to a range of everyday communications - letters, texts, internet discussions, recordings of speech - in a bid to accurately trace the user's identity.

Science Daily reports on one particular case in which a man was convicted for the murder of his ex-partner largely through the evidence of messages sent on her mobile phone. Dr Tim Grant of Aston University explains:

‘Jenny Nicholl disappeared on 30th June 2005. A linguistic analysis showed that text messages sent from her phone were unlikely to have been written by her but, rather, were more likely to have been written by her ex-lover, David Hodgson. A number of stylistic points identified within texts known to have been written by Jenny Nicholl were not present in the suspect messages. Instead, these were stylistically close to the undisputed messages of David Hodgson.

Hodgson was convicted partly because, in text messages he sent on her phone after she disappeared, he spelled "myself" as "meself". In her own text messages, Nicholl had spelled the word "myself".

‘The kind of features we were interested in were the shortening of “im” in the texts from Nicholl contrasting with “I am” in the suspect messages and the lack of space after the digit substitution in items such as “go2shop” contrasting with “ave 2 go”’.

So, while your skills of textual analysis and understanding of new modes of technology will obviously help you do well in your A Levels, they might also help you become a crime-fighting super sleuth.

Useful for:
ENGA1 - Language and Mode
ENGA3 - Language Explorations
ENA5 (old spec) - Language Change