Identifying Defendants' Spoken and Written Authorship in Courts based on Forensic Linguistics

Forensic linguistics refers to the scientific study of the application of language for court purposes. This interdisciplinary field of study can be regarded as a sub division of applied linguistics, which has been formed, based on the individuals' needs to communicate legal interactions. It needs theoretical linguistics to determine the study of intended meaning of the language in the court. The courts may need to identify the written and spoken identity of the accused persons through authentic studies. Thus, this research investigated the criminals' spoken and written authorship in the court through Menamin's (2002) approach. This study is conducted through descriptive method and analysis of court documents to arrive at the identification of the criminal spoken and written authorship in the courts. Analyzing the two cases of written and spoken documents in the courts revealed that spoken and written discourse markers might display the identity of the criminal person. McMenamin's model was used to analyze the criminal persons' linguistics and stylistics variables that lead to their identification. These markers may be procedural steps like phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic clues that are unique among the communities and even people in the context of the courts. Verbal and non-verbal communications could be analyzed based on the proposed model discussed in this study. The court clues could be matched with the McMenamin's principles in discovering the criminal spoken and written authorship. The implications of this study may help the interrogators, judges and attorneys to do the job fairly.