ABSTRACT
For lots of people, the word forensic will evoke images of white-coated scientists conducting lab tests on guns to see if they’ve recently been fired or dusting for fingerprints at the scene of a murder – the stuff of TV shows like CSI or Waking the Dead. Although in the USA the term forensics is normally associated with criminal investigation, it is used more broadly in the UK to refer to any activity or process related to the law enforcement and justice systems. In this sense, forensic linguists are those who study or interpret language use in the legal process, from crime scene to courtroom, either in the pursuit of justice or for general or applied linguistic scholarship (for examples of the latter, see Atkinson and Drew, 1979; Goodwin and Goodwin, 1997).
