| Students from disciplines other than languages and linguistics (e.g., Law/Justice, Criminology) are expected to possess basic knowledge of Speech Act Theory, semantics, pragmatics, genre analysis, or English syntax. |
| This unit introduces students to the intersection of language, crime, and law through the study of forensic linguistics. Students explore the role of linguistics in authorship attribution, linguistic profiling, and investigations of language crimes such as threat texts, plagiarism, defamation, and incitement to hatred, terrorism, discrimination, and genocide. The unit provides a solid grounding in key theories and practical methods, including discourse analysis and basic corpus and statistical tools, to analyse language in legal and criminal contexts. Students develop skills to recognise the investigative and evidential value of linguistic analysis and to describe the criminal nature of diverse forensic texts (written, spoken, and multimodal). By the end of the unit, students will appreciate the contribution of linguists as expert witnesses and will be prepared to apply linguistic methods to case-based tasks at an advanced undergraduate level. |
