Powerful evidence for the defence: an exercise in forensic discourse analysis

Until recently most forensic linguists, at least in Britain, worked with graphetic and phonetic data, that is, making comparisons of samples of handwriting (Davis 1986) and of tape-recorded voices (Nolan 1983, and this volume, Hollien 1990 and Baldwin and French 1990). In this area the methodology is already well developed. By contrast forensic discourse analysis is a very new area and this article is intended as a contribution to a methodology which is still being developed ad casum.