ABSTRACT
Forensic linguistics In 1968, Jan Svartvik published The Evans Statements: A Case For Forensic Linguistics, in which he demonstrated that disputed parts of a series of statements which had been dictated by Timothy Evans to police officers and which incriminated him in the murder of his wife, had a grammatical style measurably different from that of uncontested parts of the statements, and a new discipline was born. For the purpose of this article, I will take ‘for-
ensic linguistics’ in its widest possible meaning, embracing all descriptions of language undertaken for the purpose of assisting courts and thus will, somewhat contentiously, subsume forensic handwriting analysis and forensic phonetics under this general label. Forensic linguists help courts to answer three questions about a text – what does it say, what does it mean and who wrote, typed or authored it?
