Morphological Meaning and Phonetic Similarity

• Forensic linguists are increasingly utilized in courts across multiple countries over the past 20 years.
• Linguists apply a diverse set of tools and techniques tailored to the specific issues of each case.
• Grouping cases requires phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, discoursal, textual and pragmatic linguistic criteria.

Morphological Meaning and Phonetic Similarity

• Shuy reported on McDonald's Corporation v. Quality Inns International, Inc., concerning the trademark of the 'Mc' morpheme.
• In 1987, Quality Inns planned to create a chain of hotels called McSleep.
• Quality Inns claimed the 'Mc' prefix aimed to evoke a Scottish link and frugality.
• McDonald's challenged the McSleep mark, deeming it a tactic to capitalize on the McDonald's brand reputation, preventing the use of the McBagel's name successfully.
• McDonald's aimed to create a 'McLanguage', with Ronald McDonald teaching children how to 'Mc-ize' generic words to create 'McFries', 'McFish', 'McShakes', and 'McBest'.
• Quality Inns' lawyers argued the 'Mc' morpheme was in common and productive use, without a McDonald's link.
• They argued the prefix evolved from a patronymic to a generic term meaning "son in Johnson".
• Shuy used a corpus linguistics approach to search for 'Mcmorphemes' and found 56 examples, including McArt, McCinema, McSurgery, McPrisons, McThrift Motor Inn, and McTek.
• Shuy argued the prefix had become a lexical item meaning 'basic, convenient, inexpensive, and standardized'.
• McDonald's hired market researchers to assess the public's perception, confirming that consumers associated the prefix with McDonald's, reliability, speed, convenience, and cheapness.
• The judge ruled in favor of McDonald's, giving them massive control over the use of the morpheme.
• In March 2007, McDonald's challenged the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of a McJob as 'an unstimulating, low-paid job', suggesting a change to reflect career progression and skills.
• McDonald's maintains the word 'mcjob' can only mean a job at McDonald's.
• Trademark disputes sometimes defends against phonetically confusable marks; examples include Beck's Beer and Ex Bier; Listerine and Listogen; Smirnoff and Sarnoff.
• An Australian case involving the drug names Alkeran and Arclan highlights the potential for confusion due to pronunciation variations, especially in countries where English is a second language.
• Shuy reported on disputes over the names of contraceptive pills, OVRAL and B-OVal, and children's toys, GUK and GAK.
• Salespeople recommended stress the final syllable of OVRAL, producing a full final 'a' vowel to distinguish it from B-Oval, which has penultimate shortening the vowel.
• In the radio station case (Pathfinder Communications Corp. v. Midwest Communications Co.) involving WMEE and WMCZ, phonetic similarity led to an injunction.

Syntactic Complexity in a Letter

• Levi testified on the syntactic complexity of a letter informing beneficiaries how to claim their rights, suggesting it was poorly written.
• Syntactic features included multiple negatives, complex embeddings, nominalizations, passive verbs without subjects, and difficult combinations of logical operators.
• Extract from a sample letter: If your AFDC financial assistance benefits are continued at the present level and the fair hearing decides your AFDC financial assistance reduction was correct, the amount of AFDC assistance received to which you were not entitled will be recouped from future AFDC payments or must be paid back if your AFDC is cancelled.
• The syntactic complexity consists of a complex internal structure built out of seven clauses, six passive verbs without subjects and several complex compound nouns which themselves contain nominalized verbs without expressed subjects.
• The syntactic complexity can be simplified by: If X happens and then Y happens then either Z will happen or if R has also happened then Q must happen.
• The judge acknowledged her as a witness, but it remains more difficult when texts are legal because lawyers usually see themselves as guardians of meaning.
• The Lord Chief Justice refused expert opinion on judge’s language arguing "what the meaning is of the language used by a learned judge in the course of his directions to the jury is a matter for this Court and is not a matter for any linguistic expert."

Lexico-grammatical Ambiguity

• Kaplan et al. reported on an appeal that went to the Supreme Court in 1994, a case involving Mr. Granderson, who violated his probation by being caught in possession of cocaine.
• The Court took 'original sentence' to refer to 'imprisonment' for the type of punishment, but to 'the initial imposition of five years' (of probation) for the sentence length.
• What the court did was the linguistic equivalent of a Frenchman taking the phrase 'Pierre a fait tomber l'avocat' to mean Pierre did something to the lawyer and caused the avocado to fall.
• Kaplan et al. wrote an academic article about the Granderson appeal and three appeals presented to the Supreme Court, then distributed this to the judges.
• The Supreme Court changed the interpretation to a ‘sentence of not less than two months in prison' and Mr. Granderson released immediately.

Lexical Meaning

• Single word meanings can lead to linguist's testimonies.
• Eades reports the verb 'killem', as used by a Torres Strait Islander, has a much wider semantic range than the Standard English word 'kill'.
• 'Killem' can include 'hit' and thus cannot be used to claim the accused had necessarily confessed to manslaughter.
• The word must also be examined in another language; in 2004 an Iraqi Kurdish refugee in the US was arrested after attempting to launder money to purchase a shoulder-fired missile to assassinate the Pakistani ambassador to the UN.
• During the trial, it was said the accused was listed in an address book as 'commander' in Arabic.
• Translators at the FBI got to see the relevant page and announced that the word, written in Arabic script, was in reality Kurdish and a common honorific 'kak', which ranged from Mr to brother.

Visa Interpretation

• Sinclair gave an opinion on the average understanding of the word "visa" versus the legal term.
• A visa is 'a permit to request leave to enter' versus 'entry permit'.
• Sinclair used corpus data which revolutionised dictionary creation.
• Sinclair based his evidence mainly on a five million-word corpus of The Times (28 million at the at the time - now over 450 million).
• Analysis included 74 instances of VISA/VISAs in the sense under consideration, of which over 50 co-occurred with verbs like grant, issue, refuse, apply for, need and require.
• It also co-occurs with 'entry' and 're-entry' in examples like "you cannot enter an Arab country with an Israeli visa stamped in your passport..." and "non-Commonwealth students who require an entry visa will need a re-entry visa".
• Sinclair's concluded visa means "a kind of permit to enter a country" and "There is nothing … in these examples to suggest that a person who is in possession of a valid visa, or who does not require a visa, will be refused entry."

Use of Special Vocabulary

• Linguists may be asked to provide evidence on special vocabulary, perhaps coded drug words, occurring in otherwise non-incriminating utterances.
• Gibbons reports on a stranger case where he faced incomprehensible phrases; "I'm just so nervous of gepoeping epinsepide."
• The speakers were using a disguise known as 'pig latin', inserting an encoding nonsense syllable known as 'ep' between every syllable of each word.

Definition of Key Terms

• McMenamin reports a case on the meaning of accident, disease and syndrome.
• A child was certified to have died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and his parents subsequently made a claim against an accident and life insurance policy.
• The claim was refused on the grounds the policy did not cover deaths from illness or disease.
• A syndrome is not professionally regarded as a disease, based on medical dictionaries and publications.
• A disease is a temporally bounded state between health and death: whereas a syndrome is something a healthy child has or does not have and a child who does have it is either healthy or dead.
• SIDS is treated linguistically and collocationally like an accident, insurance company eventually paid out.

Jury Instructions

• Levi reports on jury instructions related to death penalty imposition -How well could [the language of the jury instructions] have served its purpose in communicating clearly to the jury the legal concepts they needed to understand for sentencing in a capital case?'
• Samples: If you unanimously find from your consideration of all the evidence that there are no mitigating factors sufficient to preclude the imposition of a sentence of death then you should return a verdict imposing a sentence of death. and If, on the other hand, you do not unanimously find that there are no mitigating factors sufficient to preclude the imposition of a sentence of death then you should return a verdict that the sentence of death should not be imposed.
• Levi focused on the vagueness of the word 'sufficient' and that the instructions themselves did not give an individual juror any help
• She pointed out that, while preclude did have a text-independent meaning, most of the jurors were unlikely to have known the meaning.
• She supported this testing of 50 undergraduate students; concluded doubtful comprehensibility.

Pragmatic Meaning

• Cases require reference to pragmatic rules which govern production of coherent interaction.
• Grice defined that one of the controls on speakers' contributions is the quantity maxim.
  • Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
  • Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
• What Brazil calls common ground makes conversations frequently opaque and at times incomprehensible to an overhearer.
• Authentic conversation cannot be presented on the stage due to dramatic convention which over-explicitness where characters break the quantity maxim.
• People fabricating texts in legal contexts are creating a text with an overhearer in mind.
• Extract 6.1 provides part of a fabricated telephone conversation.

Over-explicitness

• Over-explicitness can also be realized in the choice of noun groups.
• Over-explicitness can also be realized in the choice of noun groups.
• Walker was carrying two white plastic carrier bags, Hunter was carrying three white plastic carrier bags.
• It is unlikely Power would have used the combination, numeral + white + plastic + carrier + bag even once, let alone three times.

Spoken Discourse

• Police officers expanded Power said to make it transparent.
• It is about the linguistic features of product warnings, in which the legal requirement is that they be 'adequate' and then uses Gricean maxims to evaluate the adequacy of some of them.

Maxim of Relation

• In the case of American Optical Co. v. Weidenhamer, safety glasses were marketed under the labels Sure-Guard and Super Armorplate, came with a warning 'lenses are impact resistant but not unbreakable'.
• The jury deemed the warning inadequate because labels were breaking the maxim of relation. "the contradiction between the name of the product in larger print – [Super Armorplate] – and a warning in much smaller letters that the product is not unbreakable … to try to treat each as relevant [and] therefore conclude that [the] glasses will guard the eyes under all normal circumstances."

Maxim of Quantity

• Cigarette packet example – 'Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide', not providing sufficient information to cause it to break the maxim of quantity.

Pragamatic Analysis

• Questions from original proposal form example "Have you any impairments?... Loss of sight or hearing?... Loss of arm or leg?... Are you crippled or deformed?... If so explain..." to justify Prince's statement on intent and good conscious.

Accuracy of Police Interview Notes

• Converting to spoken language is not an unproblematic task, to produce a verbatim record in the interviewee's own words and Slembrouck notes, filtering occurs to remove disfluency.
• there is filtering out of 'disfluency' and other obvious properties of spokenness (e.g. intonation, stress). Repetitions, (even when strategically used ...), half-pronounced words, incomplete utterances, (un) filled pauses, false starts, reformulations, grammatical slips, etc. are equally absent.

Recorded Conversations

• Robert Burton case involves police submitted recordings of telephone calls, which they claimed an undercover officer had written down from memory.
• Defence: was that these records were too accurate and transcribed rather than remembered.
• Linguistic analysis revealed police amazing ability to recall accurately.
• Features included regularly produced discourse markers and stammer.

Narrative Analysis of a Disputed Statement

• Police officers provided much of the information in a confession.
• Statements such as "all this statement was in reply to questioning" or ‘Do you say on that Sunday you wore your shoes?’ and he would say ‘Yes’ and it would go down as ‘On that Sunday I wore my shoes’
• Examples in extract highlight expressions and items indicating uncertainty. " I am a bit hazy about what happened next "
• Court ruled confession could not be used as evidence because those observations cast doubt upon the correctness of the officers' averments.

Language Comprehension of Non-Native Speakers

• Defendants claim incompetence due to whether they understood the caution or Miranda warnings.
• Most linguists provide a test to see if non-natives understood but hard to prove.

Practical Evidence

• In the case of R v. Javid Khan, Cotterill used an analysis of CCTV footage of the police interview from evidence presented in the trial, in order to support the lack of English.
• Extracts showed "And your occupation please? ... Er (?) Market Rasen (place) ... How tall are you Javid? ... Sorry? ... How tall are you?". and despite practical evidence the linguist usually can't provide.

Language Production of Non-Native Speakers

• Challenges of police record on the grounds of language production by their French Client in the Regia v. Lapointe and Sicotte case.

Cross-cultural Differences

• Native speaker assumes the non-native speaker is using the same rules so linguists need to explain rules.
• In the case of Aboriginal witnesses the silence is a critical indication; whereas English uses silence courts to draw about the answer.
• "Gratuitous Concurrence" is the tendency of Aboriginal people to say ‘yes’ in answer to a question … regardless of whether the speaker agrees with the proposition and [even] at times [when] the speaker actually does not understand the question’ (p.166).

Problems Due to Culture

• Language testing for immigration has a history of question, by the means with for determining those, who are seeking asylum.
• Testing requires a trained linguist for any proper determination.