Language Log

One of the curious things about the uses of linguistics in the legal context is that the smallest units of language get the most public attention. Linguists analyze language in all its shapes and forms, from minute sounds to broad discourse structures, but the media's interest is on the smaller language units like letters, punctuation, and words, not the larger language units like syntax, discourse structure, and conversational strategies.

A case in point is the area of authorship identification, which typically focuses on small language units such as morphology, lexicon, or stylistic choices found in evidence documents. It's tempting to think that such language features can actually identify authors with as much validity and precision as the way DNA analysis helps law enforcement identify suspects. Personally, I have some reservations about what I see linguists doing as they try to help the police and the courts determine issues of innocence or guilt.

The LPGA has announced that it is backing down from its "plans to suspend players who could not efficiently speak English at tournaments" (which I posted about here).

[Democratic California State Sen. Leland] Yee said he understood the tour's goal of boosting financial support, but disagreed with the method. "In 2008, I didn’t think an international group like the LPGA would come up with a policy like that," Yee said. "But at the end of the rainbow, the LPGA did understand the harm that they did."

This understanding is indirectly reflected in a statement from the LPGA:

"We have decided to rescind those penalty provisions," [LPGA Tour commissioner Carolyn] Bivens said in a statement. "After hearing the concerns, we believe there are other ways to achieve our shared objective of supporting and enhancing the business opportunities for every tour player."

[ Hat tip to Ben Zimmer. ]

This just in (well, a couple of days ago): the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) "has warned its members that they must become conversant in English by 2009 or face suspension". According to the NYT article, this policy is "believed to be the only such policy in a major sport". Three other North America-based major sports organizations (Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association) have no such policy: "Given the diverse nature of our sport, we don't require that players speak English," says MLB; "This is not something we have contemplated," says the NBA.

Many of the comments on the article are crying foul, claiming discrimination, xenophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, whathaveyou. The common denominator of all of these evils, ignorance, is almost certainly at play in the decision to adopt this policy as opposed to other ways to get what the LPGA claims to be aiming for with the policy: more sponsorship opportunities. Unlike larger, better-established sports organizations like MLB, the NHL, and the NBA, the LPGA "is a group of individual players from diverse backgrounds whose success as an organization depends on its ability to attract sponsorships from companies looking to use the tour for corporate entertainment and advertisement." The geniuses at the LPGA appear to think that the money will flow a lot better if only their excellent South Korean players can answer post-game interview questions in English.

The US Patent and Trademark Office recently embarrassed itself by granting preliminary approval to a ridiculous application by Dell to trademark the generic term cloud computing. It partially reversed course soon afterward by canceling the Notice of Allowance. The matter has now reached a conclusion: USPTO has denied the application. The letter to Dell, which contains numerous examples of the use of cloud computing as a generic term, is available here.

Random House recently cancelled publication of Sherry Jones' novel The Jewel of Medina, about Muhammad's child bride Aisha, for fear of violent reaction by Muslims like that engendered by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. In a whine entitled Crying Censor in the New York Times, Stanley Fish takes Rushdie to task for describing this as "censorship" on the grounds that it is only censorship when governments forbid absolutely the publication of a work.

Sir William Jones, the great scholar of "eastern" languages routinely (though incorrectly) credited with discovering the Indo-European language family and founding modern historical linguistics, was by profession a lawyer. He learned Sanskrit as a judge in India. In his book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents, Robert Irwin reports (pp. 123-4) that:

At an early stage in his life, Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education, but Jones had resisted this on the understandable grounds that the quality of the Latin used in English law books was so very bad.

I don't think this excuse will work anymore.

Those of us who have been avoiding the use of transitive verbs because we thought they were argumentative or prejudicial can now rest easy. According to Superior Court Judge Timothy M. Frawley, they are not. He rendered his decision earlier this week, saying, “There is nothing inherently argumentative or prejudicial about transitive verbs.” This settles that long-standing linguistic controversy for good. If the Court decides it, it must be right. Right?

Several readers have encouraged me to tell a bit more about the right angle turn that led me into the field of forensic linguistics. It’s a long, strange story but I’ll try to hit the high spots here. If you’re interested you can find a more thorough report in my book, Creating Language Crimes (Oxford U Press 2005).

 After the man sitting next to on the airplane asked me to take a look at the tape-recorded evidence in a solicitation to murder case, I agreed to do so and a day or so later the lawyer in that case, Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, sent me the audio-tapes. The case was Texas v. T. Cullen Davis. The crucial conversations took place in Davis’s Cadillac, sitting in a sweltering Fort Worth parking lot.

According to the USPTO web site, the "Notice of Allowance" for Dell's attempt to trademark Cloud Computing has been cancelled.

I didn't intend an orgy of posts on English First, but one of the commenters on my previous post followed the link I gave to the English First site and in their issues section came upon H.R. 768, a bill "To provide that Executive Order 13166 shall have no force or effect, and to prohibit the use of funds for certain purposes", sponsored by no less than 55 Congresscritters. According to English First, "E.O. 13166 created an unlimited entitlement to services provided in a language other than English from all recipients of federal funds." This is simply not true.

In my post Trademark Insanity I came close to advocating the abolition of non-arbitrary trademarks. It turns out this proposal has been made in all seriousness by Lisa P. Ramsey in her paper Descriptive Trademarks and the First Amendment. Check it out.

The July/August issue of the APA's journal, Monitor, contains a report about that organization's amicus brief to the California Supreme Court concerning that state's ban on same-sex marriage. Citing this brief, the Court has now ruled 4 to 3 that restricting marriage to opposite sex couples violates California's constitution. The word, "marriage," formerly banned from use by a selected group of couples, is now unbanned.

During my many years serving as an expert witness I learned, among other things, that lawyers in one part of the US pronounce certain legal terms in ways that lawyers in other parts  of the country do not. My favorite is their variation in pronouncing voir dire. In most of the country I hear them say vwahr deer, more or less the French way, although some drop the "r" on the end of  voir. But in parts of the South this comes out more like vohr dyer, although sometimes you can hear a third syllable in the second word, making it sound like a private journal, a diary. 

Until recently, I hadn't thought much about the possibility that professionals, like doctors and lawyers, might have professional regional dialects. By this I don't mean the general regional dialects of their areas. Even US presidents speak some version of those. And I  don't mean saying "nucular" for "nuclear" or "gummit" for "government." Neither of these pronunciations seems to be regionally distributed. What I've begun to wonder is if there might be such things as Northern, North Midland, South Midland, and Southern versions of the legal expressions commonly used by lawyers.