Roger W. Shuy

Solicitation to murder, bribery, threatening, extortion, perjury--all thse are criminal acts whose medium is language. Since the 1970s American law enforcement agencies have been covertly tape recording conversations to bring such crimes to justice. With increasing frequency the decision of the court has come to turn on this taped evidence--and unravelling the ambiguity and misunderstanding that such evidence brings. Language Crimes tells the story of some of the remarkable cases that Roger Shuy, as a linguist, has served as an expert witness. They include:

• the trial of automobile executive John Z. DeLorean

• the US Senate hearing concerning disciplinary action to be taken against Senator Harrison A. Williams in the wake of the FBI's Abscam operation and the cases of lesser known, average Americans, including a San Jose jeweller, a Honolulu union representative, a Kansas City lawyer, and two Nevada brothel commissioners.

The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom

Language Crimes

Lawrence Solan

Janet Ainsworth

Among the most prominent scholars of language and law is Peter Tiersma, a law professor at Loyola Law School with a doctorate in linguistics (co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law). Tiersma's significant body of work traverses a variety of legal and linguistic fields. This book offers a selection of twelve of Tiersma's most influential publications, divided into five thematic areas that are critical to both law and linguistics: Language and Law as a Field of Inquiry, Legal Language and its History, Language and Civil Liability, Language and Criminal Justice, and Jury Instructions. Each paper is accompanied by a brief commentary from a leading scholar in the field, offering a substantive conversation about the ramifications of Tiersma's work and the disagreements that have often surrounded it.

Conversations on the Work of Peter Tiersma

Speaking of Language and Law

This book illustrates how linguistic analysis of undercover tape recordings made by law enforcement can help defense attorneys, law enforcement officers, judges, and juries better understand the effects of conversational strategies used to give the appearance of criminal activity. If only the appearance of such crime is created, law enforcement has not reached its evidentiary goal. Eleven conversational strategies were used in the twelve actual criminal cases described in this book.

How Law Enforcement Uses (and Misuses) Language

Creating Language Crimes

The Language of Perjury Cases outlines the contributions that linguistics can make to both the gathering of evidence and the way that evidence is analyzed in perjury cases. Roger W. Shuy describes eleven representative lawsuits—involving bankruptcy, unions, hunting licenses, doctors, priests, and Senators—for which he served as a consultant. Shuy's linguistic analysis illustrates how grammatical referencing, speech acts, discourse structure, framing, conveyed meaning, intentionality, and malicious language affected the outcome of these cases.

The Language of Perjury Cases

Much has been written about how criminal suspects, defendants, and the targets of undercover operations employ ambiguous language as they interact with the legal system. This book examines the other side of the coin, describing fifteen criminal investigations that demonstrate how police, prosecutors, and undercover agents use deceptive ambiguity with their subjects and targets, thereby creating misrepresentations through their uses of speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, lexicon, and grammar. This misrepresentation also can strongly affect the perceptions of later listeners, such as judges and juries, about the subjects' motives, predispositions, intentions, and voluntariness. Deception is commonly considered intentional while ambiguity is often excused as unintentional, in line with Grice's maxim of sincerity in his cooperative principle. Most of the interactions of suspects, defendants, and targets with representatives of law enforcement, however, are oppositional, adversarial, and non-cooperative events that provide the opportunity for participants to stretch, ignore, or even violate the cooperative principle. One effective way law enforcement does this is by using ambiguity. Suspects and defendants may hear such ambiguous speech and not recognize the ambiguity and therefore react in ways that they may not have understood or intended. The fifteen case studies in this book illustrate how deceptive ambiguity, whether intentional or not, is used as commonly by police, prosecutors and undercover agents as it is by suspects and defendants.

Deceptive Ambiguity by Police and Prosecutors

Emeritus Professor of Linguistics Roger W Shuy

Shuy provides specific advice in this book about how to conduct interrogations that will yield credible evidence. Other topics presented here include the analysis of how language is used and how constitutional rights are and are not protected.

The Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception

Ralph W. Fasold

Colloquim on New Ways of Analyzing Variation, 2D, Georgetown University, 1973

Colloquium on New Ways of Analyzing Variation,2Nd, Georgetown un. 1973

This collection of different perspectives on language variation serves as a companion volume to New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English.

Papers from the Second Colloquium on New Ways of Analyzing Variation

Analyzing Variation in Language

Ira Byock

Jana Staton

A Few Months to Live describes what dying is like from the perspectives of nine terminally ill individuals and their caregivers. Documenting a unique study of end-of-life experiences that included detailed conversations in home care settings, the book focuses on how participants lived their daily lives, understood their illnesses, coped with symptoms-especially pain-and searched for meaning or spiritual growth in their final months of life. The accounts are presented largely in the participants' own words, illuminating both the medical and non-medical challenges that arose from the time each learned the "bad news" through their final days of life and memorial services. Describing the nationwide crisis that surrounds end-of-life care, the authors contend that informal caregiving by relatives and close friends is an enormous and too-often invisible resource that deserves close and public attention. By incorporating not only the ill person's but also the family's perspective, they portray the nine participants in the contexts of their daily lives and relationships rather than simply as patients. Addressing such issues as palliative care, quality of life, financial hardship, grief and loss, and communications with medical personnel, the authors identify how families, professionals, and communities can respond to the challenges of terminal illness and the need to confront life's end.

Roger W. Shuy

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