This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to the emerging field of forensic linguistics. There are competing definitions and delimitations of this term but here we will use it to refer to the investigation and elucidation of language evidence in a legal context. This includes the scrutiny of language data from different stages of the legal process, ranging from emergency calls to police interviews and courtroom interaction, as well as expert assessment and witness testimony in cases where the meaning or authorship of texts or utterances are questioned. While the analysis of authentic case data is often preferred or even required, access to such highly sensitive data types is naturally restricted by legal and ethical boundaries. An increasing amount of studies therefore employ experimental designs to test hypotheses and improve methodologies.

The aim of this study is to investigate how modifications of reporting verbs, modality, style and use of quotation marks in an authentic police report can lead to different interpretations by two groups of trainee police officers. Data was collected through an experiment in a classroom setting, where police trainees discussed two versions of the same police report in focus group discussions. The trainees’ statements were categorised into three themes: impression of the victim, impression of the accused, and assessment of the situation's severity. The results show that modifications such as formal or informal choice of words and the use of scare quotes proved to be influential linguistic modifications. In contrast, variation of reporting verbs and modality appeared less significant. The two versions of the text created different impressions of both the victim and the accused, and the interpretations of the severity of the situation depicted in the text varied between the two trainee groups. This highlights the importance of further study of the linguistic constructions of victims and perpetrators in police texts, in order to ensure credibility and equality before the law.

The aim of this article is to examine how police investigators reproduce interviewees’ utterances in narratives, in direct and indirect reported speech, and by enclosing words in reports in quotation marks. Drawing on a larger study of professional writing, the pertinent research question for the current investigation is how writing techniques in police interview reports convey evidential value in the form of reported utterances. A corpus of police reports on domestic violence is explored from the theoretical perspectives of critical discourse analysis, polyvocality and reportative evidentiality. A new analytical framework for polyvocal texts is developed in terms of utterance, source and framer. The results show that it is difficult to determine whether or not words placed within quotation marks are meant to present verbatim quotes. Another finding is that police investigators are not consistent in documenting utterances from different sources, or in showing whether utterances are embedded in other utterances. This may obscure the structure of the original events and the source of crucial utterances, resulting in unclear evidential status for police reports.

On January 20, 2017, Republican candidate Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. The run-up to this inauguration was marked by unusually hostile political rhetoric. For many, this linguistic divisiveness was fodder for the post-election surge in physical and verbal aggression. Using a mixed-method approach that combines actuarial and speech act assessment, this study examines 30 Anonymous Threatening Communications sent during the US presidential election for the presence and prevalence of (para)linguistic features associated with verbal and physical threat. The article argues for more forensic linguistic research into mainstream producers and consumers of hate-filled political rhetoric.

This paper addresses the problem of disguise in written threatening messages and investigates the connection between (meta-)linguistic awareness and the successful implementation of disguise strategies through the use of two experimental studies. The first study, a language production experiment with 116 participants, focused on the actual use of disguise strategies in the participants’ written texts. The second study, which had 167 respondents, was designed to investigate the perception of threats and respondents’ awareness and ideas of disguise. The findings of these studies indicate that sociolinguistic and metalinguistic awareness, awareness of one's own language production and the ability to manipulate language in other than outer forms of words are closely connected, which has important implications for forensic authorship analyses. Bredthauer (2013) estimated that approximately 20% of the authentic threatening messages in her corpus contained some form of disguise.

Lay participation in criminal trials has primarily been studied in common law systems, thereby mainly focusing on the separate role of juries. These studies have provided detailed accounts of language use between jurors during deliberation as well as their use of storytelling techniques and common-sense reasoning in decision-making. However, only few studies have focused on the linguistic learning processes that lay judges in other legal systems go through when they deliberate cases together with a professional judge both in reaching a verdict and in sentencing. In Denmark, lay judges are appointed for a period of four years, and this paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of lay judges and their growing experience with interactions in the deliberation room. It argues that lay judges learn to use legal language in order to strengthen their arguments vis-à-vis the professional judges. Lay judges feel that their influence is dependent on how well they master new, legal context-specific ways of expressing themselves, a point that may run counter to their legitimation as lay voices in an otherwise formalized judiciary.