International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law

Fit to provoke fear? Uptakes and textual travels of threatening communications in legal genres

Marie Bojsen-Møller — 2022-09-14

This article examines what happens when two disparate types of genres collide, here the heterogeneous and illicit genre of threatening communications on the one hand and the fixed and institutional legal genres of legislation, indictments and verdicts on the other. By following the different uptakes (Freadman 1994, 2002) – including the specific types of textual travels (Heffer, Rock and Conley 2013) – of threatening communications into judgments from 50 Danish threat cases, the author both considers how this central piece of language evidence is relayed to the courts and how the overall genre of threats is taken up by the Danish legal system. The findings show that some of the instability of the genre of threats rub off onto the indictments, specifically in their task of relaying the linguistic evidence of oral threats as accurately and transparently as possible. The study concludes that each genre in the legal genre set (Devitt 1991) plays a distinctive role in managing the collision between the heterogeneity of threats and the stringency of the legal system.

A legislative theatre study of simultaneous interpretation in legal proceedings

Catrin Fflûr Huws — 2022-09-14

This paper explores simultaneous interpretation in legal proceedings. Using the legislative theatre techniques of Augusto Boal within the specific circumstances of Welsh and English in courts in Wales, the study explores a mock jury’s response to experiences of hearing proceedings via simultaneous interpretation. The study explores the impact of the interpreter’s presence on the process and considers the extent to which bilingual participants in the legal process are aware of non-bilinguals’ different experiences, and the extent to which those who listen to the proceedings via an interpreter may conflate the identity of the party/witness with that of the interpreter. It concludes with a number of recommendations in order to make monolinguals and bilinguals aware of the effects of interpretation and of the interpreter’s impact on communication.

Vowel convergence does not affect auditory speaker discriminability in humans and machine in a case study on Swiss German dialects

Elisa Pellegrino — 2022-11-03

In this study, we examined whether the convergence in interlocutors’ vowel acoustics leads to decreasing discriminability between interlocutors’ voices. Ten pairs of Grison and Zürich German speakers produced lexical items before and after dialogue interactions with evidence of vowel convergence in post-dialogue productions. In Experiment 1, native and non-native Swiss German listeners discriminated pairs of speakers whose speech was obtained pre- and post-dialogue. Results showed that listeners’ sensitivity (A’) was higher for native than non-native listeners, but comparable for pre- and post-dialogue recordings. The observed negative correlation between voice discrimination and the acoustic distance in formant space was mainly driven by a single speaker pair. In Experiment 2, the speaker recognition performance of an i-vector-based software was compared in pre- and post-dialogue speech. Results revealed no difference in the system performance between the two conditions. The findings suggest that vowel convergence does not compromise voice discriminability under the given experimental conditions.

The effect of sampling variability on overall performance and individual speakers’ behaviour in likelihood ratio-based forensic voice comparison

Bruce Xiao Wang — 2022-11-03

Remembering Dr Janet Cotterill (1968–2022)

Chris Heffer — 2022-10-10

Professor Harry Hollien (1926–2022)

Ruth Huntley Bahr — 2022-11-03

Book announcements

Richard Powell — 2022-11-03

IAFPA 2022 conference report

Bryony Nuttall — 2022-10-10

Law, Language and the Courtroom: Legal Linguistics and the Discourse of Judges Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo (2021)

Le Cheng — 2022-11-03

Law, Language and the Courtroom: Legal Linguistics and the Discourse of Judges Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo (2021) Routledge. 268pp.