The Interdisciplinary Study of Law and Language: Forensic Linguistics in Japan

Abstract

Forensic Linguistics is a relatively new field, based on a term first coined by Jan Svartvik when he wrote The Evans Statement in 1968. The book examined a wrongful conviction case, by making a corpus analysis of the original written statement of the defendant’s confession. Svartvik concluded that the authenticity of the defendant’s written confession was highly questionable, suggesting that the contents of the statement contained signs of significant external influence rather than his own authentic voice. This is how forensic linguistics, the application of principles and methods of linguistic analysis to the language of legal proceedings and documents, has become an established field in the interdisciplinary domain of law and language. This chapter introduces the first Japanese expert opinion of a forensic linguistic analysis of the testimony in a criminal case. In the opinion, I identified the characteristics of professional prosecutorial language in the prosecution witness’s answer during direct examination. By using qualitative and quantitative analysis, such as co-occurrence and concordance of words, I performed a linguistic comparison of the language used in a witness’s testimony against that of relevant documents. I concluded that the prosecutor’s ten meetings with the witness immediately before trial may possibly have influenced not only the witness’s language but also the content of the testimony itself.