Research Assignment #26: Negotiating Political desirability Bias & obliteration by incorporation & Matthew effect & Stigler's law of eponymy & Pseudepigrapha through Forensic Linguistics For the Departments of English & Media Studies by Prof Dr Sohail Ansari
Social Desirability Bias
The tendency for
respondents to give answers that are socially desirable or acceptable, that may
not be accurate.
For our purpose we change a bit:
Political Desirability Bias
The tendency for respondents to give answers that are politically desirable or acceptable, that may not be accurate.
For our purpose we change further :
The respondents are
forced to give answers that are politically desirable or acceptable, that may
not be accurate.
Definitions:
‘Forensic linguistics, legal linguistics,
or language and the law, is the application of linguistic knowledge,
methods and insights to the forensic context of
law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a
branch of applied linguistics.
‘Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which identifies,
investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some
of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, psychology, communication
research, anthropology, and sociology’.
Forensic Linguistics serves justice and helps people to find the
truth when a crime has been committed and for that forensic
linguists and other professionals work with language as evidence.
As the answers of respondents
may not be accurate, you, therefore, have to work with language
as evidence.
Read the material below.
What is Forensic Linguistics?
Does
language really matter? Definitely, yes! Especially in the area of Forensic Linguistics
(FL), language is the key element. But what is Forensic Linguistics and what is
its purpose? Is it only about language and the law or is it connected to other
fields of practice? Where can you study it? What famous cases have used this
special science? This post will answer these and other questions.
One of the main goals of Forensic Linguistics is to provide a careful and systemic analysis of language. The
results of this analysis can be used by many different professionals. For
example, police officers can use this evidence not only to interview witnesses
and suspects more effectively but also to solve crimes more reliably.
Question:
You are a researcher not a police officer so who
are your witnesses and what you are to solve?
Lawyers, judges and jury members
can use these analyses to help evaluate questions of guilt and innocence more
fairly. And translators and interpreters can use this research to communicate
with greater accuracy. Forensic Linguistics serves justice and helps people to
find the truth when a crime has been committed.
Question:
You are a researcher so what justice forensic
linguistics can serve and help you to find which truth and what crime has been
committed?
More than forty years ago, Jan Svartvik, a linguistic expert, showed dramatically just how
helpful Forensic Linguistics can be. His analysis involved the transcript of a
police interview with Timothy Evans, a man who had been found
guilty of murdering his wife and his baby daughter in 1949. Svartvik
demonstrated that parts of the transcript differed considerably in their
grammatical style when he compared them to the rest of the recorded interview.
On the basis of this research and other facts, the courts ruled that Evans had
been wrongly accused. Unfortunately, Evans had already been executed in
1950. However, thanks to Svartvik’s work, 16 years later, he was officially
pardoned and his name was cleared. Svartvik’s work is considered today to be
one of the first major cases in which Forensic Linguistics was used to achieve
justice in a court of law. Today, Forensic Linguistics is a well-established,
internationally recognized independent field of study.1
Question:
You have been given the description of the
feelings of subjects for a king by the officials. But you decide to talk to
people on your own. Tell how Svartvik’s work can help you.
Today, Forensic
Linguistics is commonly divided into two
major areas with many different sub-branches but we for our purpose discuss
only one:
Spoken language: the language used by interpreters during official interviews
of witnesses, suspects, and victims; the language used by offenders or victims
during a crime. The focus of this area is not simply what was said, but how it
was said
Question:
If focus of your interviews is not simply what is
said, but how it is said, then what you will do or observe?
Linguists who primarily
investigate written language look at features such as spelling, sentence
construction, word-choice, and punctuation, etc. By comparison, linguists who
principally examine spoken language focus on accent, dialect, pronunciation,
tone of voice, speed and rhythm of speech, etc.
Question:
How you would examine written language of the
description and then spoken language of interviews?
As the name implies, most experts working within Forensic Linguistics have a degree
in linguistics, the study of language. However, a great many of Forensic
Linguists also have a degree or advanced training in other academic fields such
as Law, Psychology, Sociology, Computational Sciences and Criminology.
Question:
Write down the relevance of each degree to
Forensic Linguistic?
There are many famous cases that have involved the analysis of language by Forensic
Linguistics. These cases have dealt with suicide letters written by famous
artists like Kurt Cobain; ransom notes connected to Charles Lindbergh (the first pilot who managed to cross the Atlantic flying
from New York to Paris) whose son was kidnapped and later found dead in the
backyard of Lindbergh family home; a kidnapping note discovered after the
disappearance of JonBenét Ramsey, a child beauty queen who was reported missing by her family and
later found dead in the family cellar.
Question:
What possible cases can be for you to know the
reality in a kingdom?
Not all cases involving Forensic Linguists involved violent crimes. There are also many legal disputes
over trademark. One of the most famous is the legal suit Beatles’s Apple Corps
brought against Steven Jobs’s Apple Inc. Another common type of non-violent
crime that Forensic Linguists may provide useful evidence for involves
arguments over who originally wrote a text like a poem, short story, or novel.
These cases involve questions of plagiarism. When it is unclear who wrote a
text, a forensic linguist can analyse language samples from multiple authors
and then determine which author’s language matches the disputed text the most.
Two popular pieces of literature where this technique has been used are J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and Dan Brown’s The
Da Vinci Code.
Obliteration by incorporation
Robert K. Merton says:
‘In sociology
of science, obliteration
by incorporation (OBI) occurs when at some stage in
the development
of a science, certain ideas
become so universally accepted and commonly used that their contributors are no
longer cited. Eventually, its source and creator are
forgotten ("obliterated") as the concept enters common knowledge (is "incorporated").
Obliteration occurs when "the sources of an idea, finding or concept,
become obliterated by incorporation in canonical knowledge, so that only a few
are still aware of their parentage’
Question:
You discover that the sources of ideas,
findings and concepts are attributed to a king as they were obliterated. How
will you determine?
‘In the sociology of
science, "Matthew effect" was a
term coined by Robert K. Merton he writes in "The Matthew Effect in Science to describe how, among other things, eminent scientists
will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if
their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to
researchers who are already famous. For example, a prize will almost always be awarded
to the most senior researcher involved in a project, even if all the work was
done by a graduate student.
This was later formulated by Stephen Stigler as Stigler's law of
eponymy – "No scientific discovery
is named after its original discoverer" – with Stigler explicitly
naming Merton as the true discoverer, making his "law" an example of
itself
Richard
Bauckham writes:
‘Pseudepigrapha are falsely
attributed works, texts whose
claimed author is not the true author, or a work whose real author attributed
it to a figure of the past.
Assessing
the actual writer of a text locates questions of pseudepigraphical attribution
within the discipline of literary criticism’.
Nepotism
The term comes from
the Italian word nepotismo, which is based on the Latin word nepos meaning
'nephew'. Since the Middle Ages and until the late 17th century, some Catholic popes and bishops, who had taken vows of chastity, and therefore usually had no legitimate offspring of their
own, gave their nephews such positions of preference as were often accorded by
fathers to son.
Favoritism:
Cronyism:
·
Cronyism,
partiality in awarding advantages to friends or trusted colleagues
Question:
You discover that because of nepotism, favoritism
and cronyism favor is granted.
What
kind of favor and how the understanding of Matthew effect &Stigler's law of
eponymy & Pseudepigrapha
can help in this regard.
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