Graham M. Davies
University of Leicester
REFERENCES
1 Bilton, M. (2012). Wicked beyond belief: The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. London: Harper-Collins.
2 Dror, I. E. (2018). Biases in forensic experts. Science, 360( 6386), 243.
3 Oxburgh, G., Myklebust, T., Grant, T., & Milne, R. (2016). Communication in investigative and legal contexts. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our thanks to everyone who has supported and helped us with this book, including the Wiley team, especially Monica Rogers and Christina Weyrauch. We also thank Joyce Laskowski for assisting with the early editing of the chapters.
About the Editors
Malcolm Coulthard is Professor Emeritus of Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, United Kingdom, where he founded the Centre for Forensic Linguistics. He was foundation president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists and founding editor of the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law and Language and Law – Linguagem e Direito.
Ria Perkins currently works (as a civil servant) for the Ministry of Defence and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics in Birmingham, United Kingdom. She holds a PhD from Aston University (Centre for Forensic Linguistics), and her research and teaching have focused on the application of linguistics in specialist fields. Her casework speciality is forensic authorship profiling, and her research interests include the language of persuasion and power and other language influence detection (OLID).
Isabel Picornell is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics and Director of QED Limited, a consultancy offering forensic linguistic services to the corporate and intelligence sector. She holds a PhD from Aston University (Centre for Forensic Linguistics). Picornell’s research specialties are linguistic strategies of deception in witness narratives and authorship in faked contexts. She is an ACFE certified fraud examiner, a CUBS certified expert witness, and current President of the International Association of Forensic and Legal Linguistics.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Lisa Donlan is an ESRC-funded postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester. Her research expertise lies in employing computational and digital humanities methodologies to explore linguistic hypotheses. For the past two years, she has taught forensic linguistics at the University of Manchester. She has also worked as a research assistant in Andrea Nini’s forensic linguistics consultancy practice, where she uses her computational linguistics expertise to aid in cases of authorship profiling and authorship analysis.
Tim Grant is Director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics. He is the author of books, journal articles, and research reports in forensic linguistics and neighboring disciplines. He has provided advice, assisted in investigations, and written expert witness reports for individuals, businesses, and organizations including U.K. and overseas police forces and agencies, and he has given evidence in court for defense and prosecution and in civil cases and arbitration hearings on many occasions. In 2019, Grant was awarded a commendation from the National Crime Agency for his work that helped lead to the arrest of Matthew Falder.
Jack Grieve is Professor of Corpus Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. He was previously employed as a lecturer in forensic linguistics at the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University and as a postdoctoral research fellow in the quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics research group at KU Leuven. He received a PhD in applied linguistics from Northern Arizona University in 2009. His research focuses on corpus linguistics, dialectology, and forensic linguistics.
Tanya Karoli Christensen is Professor of Danish language at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her involvement in the field of forensic linguistics is a direct extension of her research in functional grammar, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, which are all relevant for the study of language use in legal settings. She currently leads a research project on the language and genre of threats, an important part of which is creating a linguistically annotated corpus of Danish threatening messages. She consults regularly for police and prosecution in criminal cases and for claimants in civil cases.
Gerald R. McMenamin is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at California State University, Fresno, where he began teaching in 1980 following teaching assignments at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, University of Delaware, and University of California, Los Angeles. McMenamin is currently lecturer of Spanish linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research specialties include Spanish linguistics, second language acquisition, stylistics, linguistic variation, and forensic linguistics. His academic preparation includes a BA (philosophy) from University of California, Irvine; MA (linguistics) from California State University, Fresno; and doctorado en lingüística hispánica from El Colegio de México, México, DF. He is the author of several books and articles, including Forensic Linguistics: Advances in Forensic Stylistics (2002) and Introducción a la lingüística forense: un libro de curso (2017) and papers on language acquisition, linguistic variation, and forensic linguistics. He presently works as a consultant and expert witness in forensic linguistics.
I. M. Nick holds a PhD in English linguistics (University of Freiburg, Germany), an MA in German linguistics (University of Washington, Seattle), a BA in German language and literature (University of Maryland), a BSc in clinical and social psychology (University of Maryland), and an MSc in forensic and investigative psychology (University of Liverpool, United Kingdom). In summer 2010, she was awarded the German postdoctoral degree, the “Habilitation,” for her research in English linguistics. Within forensic linguistics, her area of specialization is suicide letter analysis. She is a member of the Public Health Committee for the American Association of Suicidology (AAS) and President of the Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics.
Andrea Nini is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in linguistics and English language at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, where he teaches courses in forensic linguistics, stylistics, and quantitative methods. His specialization is the analysis of linguistic data using computational methods, in particular for the study of linguistic individuality and authorship identification. His PhD thesis was on the authorship profiling of malicious texts in forensic contexts, and he has published on the authorship attribution of historical texts such as the Bixby letter and the Jack the Ripper letters. Nini has also carried out research and published in other areas of linguistics such as computational sociolinguistics and register variation. In addition to his academic work, he offers consultancy as a forensic linguist to law firms and law enforcement agencies, predominantly in cases of disputed authorship.
Sheila Queralt Estevez is founder and director of Laboratorio SQ-Lingüistas Forenses. Since 2010, she has undertaken more than 100 consultations in forensic linguistics related to the forensic comparison of written texts and discourse analysis in Spain and abroad (Canada, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, United States, South Africa) alongside different police forces. In 2019, she was appointed mentor of the First National League of Challenges in Cyberspace organized by the Guardia Civil (Spanish law enforcement agency). She is the author of the Decalogue for Requesting a Linguistics Expert
