The FORGE and the Pragmatics & Stylistics Research Group (PaSty) are delighted to announce our second joint external guest speaker of 2015: Dr Magdalena Leitner. Magdalena is a teaching and research assistant at the University of Zurich. Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
The metadiscourse of verbal offences in 16th-/17th-century Scottish law courts

ABSTRACT
The way people talk about other people’s communicative behaviour in conflicts offers great insights into notions of offensive language use, in the present and in the past (see Bax and Kádár, 2011: 12, Culpeper, 2011: 71-112). This study reconstructs the metadiscourse of verbal offences in 16th-/17th-century Scottish court records, addressing the following questions: which terms were used in lawsuits to judge verbal offences? What do they reveal about period- and context-specific notions of offensive language use? Court records are valuable sources for investigating historical perceptions of verbal offences because everyday conflicts were recorded as legal evidence (see Kytö et al., 2011: 1).

The present investigation contributes to the growing body of historical metadiscourse studies on impoliteness, verbal aggression and related concepts (Archer, 2014, Bös, 2014, McEnery, 2006). It combines Culpeper’s (2011) perception-based concept of impoliteness with qualitative methods and insights from historical pragmatics. Data were drawn from the records of the central criminal court in Edinburgh and from local Scottish church courts between 1560 and 1660 (see Sources below). The Historical Thesaurus of the OED was consulted as a reference point when categorising the collected terms for verbal offences.

Findings suggest that criminal and ecclesiastical courts had mostly distinct vocabularies for judging verbal offences, but shared major semantic concepts, namely breaches of morals and offences against authorities. Both court types had relatively large inventories of evaluative expressions for offensive language use. However, a small set of apparently standard legal terms was predominant, which corresponds to previous observations concerning the formulaic nature of 16th-century Scottish legal discourse (Graham, 1996: 74, Kopaczyk, 2013, Todd, 2002: 19). Surprisingly, church courts did not show a clear preference for judging verbal offences in religious terms. Distribution patterns of verbal offence terms across different trial stages indicate shifts in communicative purposes from less evaluative recording of facts to the highly evaluative tone of courtroom accusations.

BIO
Magdalena Leitner joined the UZH English Department as a Teaching and Research Assistant in October 2014. She completed her PhD on Conflicts in Early Modern Scottish Letters and Law Courts in May 2015. Her doctoral thesis was supervised by Professor Jeremy J. Smith at the University of Glasgow, UK, where she also spent three years before returning to Switzerland. Magdalena holds a Lizenziat degree (i.e. a joint BA & MA) from the University of Zurich in English Linguistics and Literature, Educational Psychology and Film Studies. She wrote her Lizenziatsarbeit (i.e. Masters thesis) on the topic of Thou and You in Late Middle Scottish and Early Modern Northern English Witness Depositions, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Andreas H. Jucker.

TIME & PLACE
W06, 1300-1400, Fri 13^th Nov, County South D72

The FORGE and the Lancaster University Phonetics Lab are delighted to announce our first joint external guest speaker of 2015: Dr Erica Gold. Erica began working at the University of Huddersfield in 2014, and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics. Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
What can Bayes do for you? Using phonetic and linguistic evidence in the courtroom

ABSTRACT
The forensic sciences are currently undergoing what Saks and Koehler (2005) have suggested is a ‘paradigm shift’. That is more and more forensic scientists are adopting the likelihood ratio framework for presenting forensic evidence in the courtroom. This talk will provide a basic introduction to Bayesian statistics and likelihood ratios, with an emphasis on phonetic and linguistic evidence. The presentation will consider the current methods for presenting phonetic and linguistic evidence in the UK, and also provide empirical results from likelihood ratio research using phonetic parameters. The talk will then conclude by looking at potential avenues for development in the field.

TIME & PLACE
W05, 1600-1700, Wed 04^th Nov, Frankland Colloquium

The FORGE and the Pragmatics & Stylistics Research Group (PaSty) are delighted to announce our first joint external guest speaker of 2015: Danuta Reah. Danuta is a crime novelist who has written books featuring forensic linguistics. Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
Language, Crime, and Death

ABSTRACT
Please be aware that this talk will involve reference to criminal cases, including murder.

Our language tells more about us that we realise – every time we speak or write, we give away things we don’t intend. This is the field of the forensic linguist, searching for the truth that is hiding behind the words. This talk looks at aspects of forensic linguistics: the man who was hanged because the word ‘the’ appeared in his statement – or did it? the way a voice identified a criminal decades after the crime. It also looks at the ways a novelist can weave stories around the secrets hidden in language.

BIO
Danuta Reah published her first novel, Only Darkness, in 1999. She has subsequently written seven novels, the latest being The Last Room. She had also published prize winning short stories. Crime – or dissent – runs in the family. Her father was declared an enemy of the state by Stalin, and one of her ancestors was hung, drawn and quartered in 1646 for his religious beliefs.

You can find out more about Danuta’s work and life at her website. Danuta is also on Twitter and Facebook.

TIME & PLACE
W04, 1600-1700, Tue 27^th Oct, Management School Lecture Theatre 3

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speaker: Dr Lara Warmelink (Psychology). Details of her talk are below:

The FORGE is delighted to announce our next external guest speaker: Tim Grant. Tim is a Professor in Forensic Linguistics at Aston University whose research interests include forensic authorship analysis and the linguistic analysis of police interviews. Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Assuming identities online – tracking and tracing the multiple linguistic identities of online paedophiles

ABSTRACT
NB This talk will involve the outline description of sexual offences committed against children and adults and short extracts of online sexual abuse conversations will be discussed.

It has been widely noted that online identities have ‘an ultimate linguistic nature’ (Tardini and Cantoni, 2005: 374) owing to the comparative scarcity of other semiotic resources as compared to face to face interaction. Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) research on group identity has variously identified discourse styles associated with participant age, gender, ethnicity and race (see Herring, 2004), but there has been little attempt to bring these facets of identity together, nor to explore the notion of idiolect – ‘the individual’s unconscious and unique combination of linguistic knowledge, cognitive associations and extra-linguistic influences’ (McMenamin, 2002: 53). Furthermore, it has been noted that existing approaches to identity in computer-mediated interaction are still limited by their ‘mechanistic view of identity management’ (Lamerichs and te Molder, 2003) rather than taking a view that acknowledges identities are actively constructed for particular occasions.

This talk examines two aspects of online identity assumption and identity play in criminal contexts.

In the first instance investigative forensic linguistics has tended to focus on analysis, either in terms of comparative authorship analysis – to determine likely writers of a text, or in terms of sociolinguistic profiling – to determine characteristics of a writer (Grant, 2008). In the talk I’ll describe forensic linguistic case work which can help link two identities as being written by the same individual and describe how such work can have a practical impact in the police investigation.  Further to the practical impact I’ll discuss what stays the same and what changes when individuals consciously adopt alternative online identities, and so throw some light on the academic exploration of linguistic identity performance.

In the second aspect of work on online identity disguise I’ll detail a new ESRC research project, started this August, called Assuming Identities Online.  This project addresses the growing need, identified in the recent HM Inspectors of Constabulary report, for the further professionalisation of online undercover policing.  Drawing on a corpus of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) logs and e-mails provided by a UK police force, we examine the discursive processes of identity construction, negotiation and manipulation in interactions between suspects and undercover officers in cases of grooming, child abuse and the trafficking of children and adults for sex. I’ll describe how using this evidence base we are moving from work in authorship analysis to authorship synthesis as we develop a  training  package in the assumption of online identities for undercover police officers.

Finally I hope to indicate just some of the ethical issues which need to be acknowledged and addressed to work in this field and the wider need to develop ethical frameworks for forensic linguistic research and practice.

BIO
Professor Tim Grant is the Director of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University. Tim is on the Ethics and Professional Practice Committee of the International Association of Forensic Linguists and is a member of the Scientific Committee for the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group (iIIRG). Tim has extensive experience of providing linguistic evidence in a variety of cases including successful investigations into sexual assault, stalking, murder, and terrorism. Tim is particularly interested in forensic authorship analysis focusing on short messages such as text messages and Twitter posts, and he is also interested in how linguists can advise and train police officers to conduct better interviews. Tim’s work has appeared in featured newspaper articles and on BBC radio programmes. Furthermore, after providing a profile of a writer of roughly 60 racially and sexually abusive letters, Tim appeared as part of a media appeal on the BBC Crimewatch programme. This media appeal was successful in finding the offender, who matched the profile proposed by Tim.

TIME & PLACE
1500-1600, Tue 17th Feb 2015, Cavendish Lecture Theatre

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speakers: Prof Paul Iganski and Dr Abe Sweiry (Law; Centre for Law & Society; Centre for Crime, Law & Justice). Details of their talk are below:

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speaker: Prof Paul Baker (Linguistics & English Language). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Hate speech on the down-low: Jan Moir, Stephen Gately and the Daily Mail

ABSTRACT
This talk is concerned with the analysis of an opinion article about the death of pop star Stephen Gately published in the The Daily Mail on 23 October 2009. The article received the highest number of complaints to the Press Complaints Commission (over 25,000) ever recorded, with many people claiming that the author, Jan Moir, was homophobic, although the complaints were not upheld. A linguistic analysis reveals that while the article contains no clear-cut uses of homophobic language there are some ambiguous statements which could be interpreted in multiple ways. However, by complementing the linguistic analysis with a wider-ranging context-based analysis, including reference to discourse prosodies via the British National Corpus, social attitudes research, other Mail articles, the Press Complaints Commission guidelines and audience reception, I hope to show that a convincing argument can be made that the article probably was homophobic. In terms of making a case for the presence of “hate speech”, I argue then that we must go beyond the words in texts, to consider how they are positioned within social context.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 20th Nov, County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speaker: Prof Paul J. Taylor (Psychology). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Email Physics: What can we infer about hierarchies, groupiness and deceit from everyday emails

ABSTRACT
Much can be inferred from the way an author changes his or her language during social interaction. I will describe our efforts to measure linguistic accommodation (or verbal mimicry if you’re a psychologist) and how these measures can be used to infer social position and social motive. I will report one study that demonstrates how mimicry in email replies varies as a function of recipient closeness in a way that fulfills Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis. I will report a second study that shows how a reduction in language mimicry amongst coworkers may be used to detect workers attempting an insider attack on their organisation.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 30th Oct, County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our first ever internal speaker: Dr Alistair Baron (Computing & Communications; Security Lancaster). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Using language analysis to predict age and gender with fake online personas

ABSTRACT
There are a variety of reasons why people choose to use fake profiles online, ranging from the perfectly innocent to deception in order to commit serious crimes. I will demonstrate how differences in language use can be utilised to predict age and gender, even when individuals are attempting to hide their true identity. The irregular nature of online texts poses significant barriers to language analysis, but by pre-processing texts with spelling normalisation, much of the negative impact can be nullified. It will also be shown that the spelling irregularities themselves can be used to aid age and gender prediction.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 09th Oct, County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend. Note that this venue has a maximum seating capacity of 20.

IF YOU MISSED IT:

You can watch an earlier version of this talk.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our first ever external guest speaker: James R. Fitzgerald. Jim is a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent who, during his long career in the FBI, worked on high profile cases such as those of the Unabomber, Jon Benet Ramsey, and the D.C. Sniper. Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Uncovering staged suicide: Case studies in authorship attribution
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