ABSTRACT
As our discipline comes of age, with two whole decades of specialised research and writing behind us, we have been able to bring together a comprehensive volume of chapters written by both established and up-and-coming forensic linguists. Many of them have suggested directions for future work and map out a rich and promising territory for the next generation of researchers to explore. In Section I, the Language of the Law and the Legal Process, we see two common
issues emerging. First, the complexity of legal language and the challenges this presents for lay people involved in the legal process. This is treated in chapters by Bhatia, Stygall, Drew and Walker, Tiersma and Aldridge and the theme also runs into Section II, where authors consider how the expert linguist negotiates this comprehensibility gap when acting as interpreter and assessor (Hale, Kredens and Morris and English). The second issue is one of legal rights; how are these rights asked for, given, nego-
tiated and denied? Our authors present different and sometimes conflicting accounts of the current global picture. The chapters about Britain written by Stokoe and Edwards and Rock present a very different picture from the one painted by Ainsworth for the United States. This suggests that the US has something to learn from the UK in terms of access to and intervention by lawyers in the interrogation process. Both of these issues have a linking theme – that of power – and there are, not surprisingly, many chapters concerned with this topic. Felton Rosulek shows us the power of lawyers’ closing speeches and Tkacˇuková the disadvantaged position of lay people when they represent themselves in court. The relationship between power and advantage and disadvantage is seen starkly
in the chapters by Ainsworth, Eades, Ehrlich, Grebler, Greenlee, Shuy and Stygall and this critical forensic linguistics focus is one which will certainly be taken forward into the next two decades of research and writing. As Wodak (2007: 209) says the aim of critical linguistics is to ‘demystify discourses by deciphering ideologies’ and a critical approach in forensic linguistics means that we unpack the ways that power and dominance are done in legal contexts and how disadvantage and control are produced. We know that ‘language is not powerful on its own – it gains power by the use powerful people make of it’ (see Bhatia, this volume), and we have seen how this is exploited in a number of the chapters. It is only by scrutinising and exposing powerful ideologies in action (such as those discussed by Shuy, this volume) that forensic linguists can make a difference in terms of acting in the social world and effecting change. CDA looks outside the text ‘to get a sense of its social context’ as it sees that meanings in texts are created through having ‘a broad perspective on the social order’ (Fairclough 2001: 129). Problems in legal texts are social problems and a critical forensic linguistic approach enables us to provide analyses that suggest change and make an impact in the socio-legal world. Section II focuses on the linguist as an expert in legal processes and all of the authors
show us that a solid descriptive methodology is at the heart of this work, though many of these methods are pioneering and emergent. Justice Gray, in his chapter in Section III, speaks about some of the dangers for experts if they make their methods public – lawyers will consult the literature and be more prepared for cross-examination – but he also offers a fascinating glimpse into his own courtroom and possibly a new way of treating expert witnesses and their evidence: the ‘hot tub’. Greenlee sees the advantage of a developing forensic literature as a resource for defence lawyers. The final section, entitled New Debates and New Directions is the most forward
looking. Here, we offer only a brief glimpse of four new directions for forensic linguistics: multimodal analysis (Matoesian), computational approaches (Woolls) and the future role of experts in the courtroom from both the perspective of a linguist (Shuy) and from a judge (Gray). And in this, the closing chapter, we continue that discussion, highlighting some other important directions in which we think the discipline will develop during the next decade and some of the issues it might pursue.
