ABSTRACT
Over the past 20 years there has been a rapid growth in the frequency with which courts in a number of countries have called upon the expertise of linguists. In this chapter we will give examples drawn from a large number of cases to illustrate the kinds of problems they have been asked to address and the wide range of tools and techniques they have used in their work. All cases require a different selection from the linguist’s toolkit – phonetic and phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, discoursal, textual and pragmatic – and in what follows we have tried to group them according to linguistic criteria.
