ABSTRACT
Forensic Linguistic (FL) analysis is often directed to pragmatic, discourse-analytic, and lexicosemantic questions: What did the lieutenant governor mean to convey when he said "OK" to an FBI agent posing as a gangster in response to the offer of campaign contributions? Many FL elicitation projects are based in academia and are thus subject to explicit ethical requirements involving research involving human subjects. The experimenters work as independent researchers who are paid for their services, increasingly using online methodologies. Occasionally, linguists are also paid to advise the survey makers and/or critique their results at trial. The lion’s share of FL data is, however, not experimental but occurs naturally, prior to analysis. Courts tend to accept FL testimony so long as the analysts' conclusions are strictly linguistic and offered as a means of assisting the judge and jury in their ultimate determination of legal questions.
