them to conclude that he probably came from the village of Castletown, a suburb of Sunderland. This location fell well outside the suspect search area and was thoroughly investigated before being eventually discounted by the investigators. When the real murderer, Peter Sutcliff, was arrested, it was evident that the tape had been a hoax. The perpetrator, John Humble, who was subsequently arrested and convicted in 2006, had spent most of his life in and around Castletown, so the linguists had been correct in their judgement (Bilton, 2012).
As this case illustrates, forensic linguistics covers a wide and developing field and the editors have sought to impose some organizational structure to encompass the diverse contributions that are celebrated in its pages. One theme which unites all the contributions is the search for objective measures and replicable procedures: in other words, new investigators, faced with the same corpus of material, should independently be able to reach the same conclusions. Section 1 deals with anonymous or disputed authorship: in the opening contribution, Tim Grant and Jack Grieve demonstrate how meticulous regard for objective methods can avoid confirmation bias—the tendency of experts of all shades to report what is expected or invited, a feature of forensic investigation mercilessly exposed through the research of Itiel Dror (Dror, 2018). Section 2 is given over to issues around the meaning and interpretation of spoken and written communications. A forensic linguistic analysis of the police transcripts in California v. Ceja by Gerald McMenamin demonstrates how a Spanish-American defendant failed to understand the intent of the ‘Miranda’ warning, read to all suspects prior to US police interviews, and so lost access to her constitutional rights to be legally represented and avoid self-incrimination. Not for the first, and certainly not the last, time, the Court of Appeal rejected this submission based on the new science. How long, I wonder, before a case occurs in England where a migrant refugee claims not to have understood the implications of the standard Police Caution? They will be fortunate if they have the support of an expert like McMenamin.
The Editors of this new text, Isabel Picornell, Malcom Coulthard and Ria Perkins are all experienced forensic linguists currently or previously associated with the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, which Emeritus Professor Coulthard, a true pioneer of this field, was a founder. In 2019, recognising the growing importance of the discipline, support from Research England enabled the Centre to become the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics with greatly expanded staff and facilities, now under the leadership of Professor Grant.
Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistic Casework deserves to be widely read by professionals and students of psychology and linguistics and indeed, all those interested in the application of forensic science to language and the new ways in which, text, messages and the spoken word can be analysed to reveal new information about the nature and identity of the authors.
Graham M. Davies
University of Leicester
REFERENCES
1 Bilton, M. (2012). Wicked beyond belief: The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. London: Harper-Collins.
2 Dror, I. E. (2018). Biases in forensic experts. Science, 360( 6386), 243.
3 Oxburgh, G., Myklebust, T., Grant, T., & Milne, R. (2016). Communication in investigative and legal contexts. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our thanks to everyone who has supported and helped us with this book, including the Wiley team, especially Monica Rogers and Christina Weyrauch. We also thank Joyce Laskowski for assisting with the early editing of the chapters.
About the Editors
Malcolm Coulthard is Professor Emeritus of Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, United Kingdom, where he founded the Centre for Forensic Linguistics. He was foundation president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists and founding editor of the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law and Language and Law – Linguagem e Direito.
Ria Perkins currently works (as a civil servant) for the Ministry of Defence and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics in Birmingham, United Kingdom. She holds a PhD from Aston University (Centre for Forensic Linguistics), and her research and teaching have focused on the application of linguistics in specialist fields. Her casework speciality is forensic authorship profiling, and her research interests include the language of persuasion and power and other language influence detection (OLID).
Isabel Picornell is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics and Director of QED Limited, a consultancy offering forensic linguistic services to the corporate and intelligence sector. She holds a PhD from Aston University (Centre for Forensic Linguistics). Picornell’s research specialties are linguistic strategies of deception in witness narratives and authorship in faked contexts. She is an ACFE certified fraud examiner, a CUBS certified expert witness, and current President of the International Association of Forensic and Legal Linguistics.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Lisa Donlan is an ESRC-funded postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester. Her research expertise lies in employing computational and digital humanities methodologies to explore linguistic hypotheses. For the past two years, she has taught forensic linguistics at the University of Manchester. She has also worked as a research assistant in Andrea Nini’s forensic linguistics consultancy practice, where she uses her computational linguistics expertise to aid in cases of authorship profiling and authorship analysis.
Tim Grant is Director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics. He is the author of books, journal articles, and research reports in forensic linguistics and neighboring disciplines. He has provided advice, assisted in investigations, and written expert witness reports for individuals, businesses, and organizations including U.K. and overseas police forces and agencies, and he has given evidence in court for defense and prosecution and in civil cases and arbitration hearings on many occasions. In 2019, Grant was awarded a commendation from the National Crime Agency for his work that helped lead to the arrest of Matthew Falder.
Jack Grieve is Professor of Corpus Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. He was previously employed as a lecturer in forensic linguistics at the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University and as a postdoctoral research fellow in the quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics research group at KU Leuven. He received a PhD in applied linguistics from Northern Arizona University in 2009. His research focuses on corpus linguistics, dialectology, and forensic linguistics.
Tanya Karoli Christensen is Professor of Danish language at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her involvement in the field of forensic linguistics is a direct extension of her research in functional grammar, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, which are all relevant for the study of language use in legal settings. She currently leads a research project on the language and genre of threats, an important part of which is creating a linguistically annotated corpus of Danish threatening messages. She consults regularly for police and prosecution in criminal cases and for claimants in civil cases.
Gerald R. McMenamin is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at California State University, Fresno, where he began teaching in 1980 following teaching assignments at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, University of Delaware, and University of California, Los Angeles. McMenamin is currently lecturer of Spanish linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research specialties include Spanish linguistics, second language acquisition, stylistics, linguistic variation, and forensic linguistics. His academic preparation includes a BA (philosophy) from University of California, Irvine; MA (linguistics) from California State University,