The linguist as expert witness

Abstract

This article illustrates the problems faced and the techniques used by the linguist when acting as an expert witness. Examples are drawn from a wide variety of cases, ranging from disputes about the meaning of individual morphemes in a trademark case and individual words in jury instructions, through grammatical complexity in a letter and a statute to the ‘ownership’ of particular words and phrases in two plagiarism cases and accusations of the fabrication of a whole text in a murder case. Linguists are seen to use evidence derived from corpora and questionnaires as well as insights drawn from morphology, grammar, lexis, pragmatics, semantics and discourse and text analysis to reach and support their opinions.