ForensicLab at UPF

The Forensic Linguistics Laboratory (ForensicLab) at Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada (IULA) was a centre at Universitat Pompeu Fabra that developed teaching and research activities in forensic linguistics, and made use of linguistic evidence for forensic purposes in Court. It was founded in 1993 by Professor Maria Teresa Turell, pioneer in forensic linguistics in Spain, who directed it until 2013. It was a section of the research group (SGR2008-00650), known as Unitat de Variació Lingüística (UVAL), currently renamed as Morfoval.

Generally speaking, Forensic Linguistics can be defined as the interface between Language and the law. In the context of its broadest sense, this discipline covers all areas where law and language overlap: Language and Law, Language and the Legal Process and Language as Evidence.

• Language and Law studies legislation; comprehensibility of legal documents; analysis/interpretation of legal texts; legal genres; the history of legal languages; legal discourse; multilingual matters in legal contexts; discourse analysis of legal resources; language and disadvantage before the law; language minorities and the legal system: language rights; power and the law; intercultural matters and mediation in legal contexts.
• Language and the Legal Process covers interviews with vulnerable witnesses; communicative challenges of vulnerable witnesses; police interviews; investigative interviewing; language testing of asylum seekers; bilingual courtrooms and second language issues within the legal system; courtroom interpreting; courtroom interaction; courtroom translating; courtroom, police and prison language; language addressed to the judge and jury in common and civil law courtrooms.
• Language as Evidence involves the use of linguistic evidence in criminal cases (forensic speaker identification/voice comparison; authorship analysis and attribution; compiling corpora of statements, confessions, suicide notes) and civil cases (plagiarism detection and copyright infringement; trademark and patents litigation; contract disputes; defamation cases; product liability cases; product warnings), as well as aspects of forensic sociolinguistics, dialectology, semantics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics, useful in spoken and written linguistic profiling.