Language Log

Questions about disclosure of possible conflicts of interest don't arise very often in our field. I take that as that as a testament to the economic insignificance of our results. There are plenty of people who have a financial interest in linguistic research, but they rarely have a stake in having it come out one […]

An article today’s NY Times and another in WalesOnline tell us about a linguist in Wales who was praised for discovering that a murderer — who had been having an affair with his victim — unconsciously revealed his identity as the writer of a fake text message that included either the phrases, “need to sort […]

A bullshit lie detector company run by a charlatan has managed to semi-successfully censor a peer reviewed academic article. And I don't like it one bit. But first, some background, and then we'll get to the censorship stuff. Five years ago I wrote a Language Log post entitled "BS conditional semantics and the Pinocchio effect" […]

Reporting from the geriatric desk at Language Log Plaza: I retired from the classroom almost 13 years ago and I sometimes miss teaching linguistics to my students. I’ve continued to consult with lawyers on their criminal and civil law cases and I still write articles and books, but I’ve found that I rather miss my […]

Mark Liberman’s post about the phone call that has caused people to try to determine who was responsible for the Mumbai attacks highlights a problem in the current practice of forensic linguists who do authorship analysis these days. His post was about speaker identification (or nationality/ethnicity of speaker), so I’m stretching things a bit here, […]

Language Loggers haven’t posted much on the category of ethics lately, so this may be a good time to announce a panel called “Ethical Issues in Forensic Linguistic Consulting,” which will take place at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America from January 8 to 11 at the San Francisco Hilton. I will […]

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, […]

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 […]

Many, many years ago I was privileged to study American regional dialects with one of the leading dialectologists of that era, Raven I. McDavid. It was a career-changing experience for me because he taught me the sheer joy of gathering and analyzing the actual language spoken by everyday people in everyday settings. The focus of […]

You're asked: (1) Do you mind if I ask you a question? How do you respond? There's a complexity here, no matter what your opinions about question-asking are. The problem is that (1) has the form of a yes-no question (about what the addressee's sensibilities are) but also conveys a request (for the addressee to […]