Academia can instigate policy debates. Data collection instruments like the Census are framed in a monolingual mindset that makes it difficult to obtain a full picture of language diversity, while the smart city concept can be applied to language to capture a wider range of data. In using language to determine origin and entitlement to refugee status, we interrogated prevailing concepts and enriched judicial procedures by offering new methods of analysis and interpretation, helping to ensure a more just consideration of claims. The chapter also describes the managerial culture of control over the public narrative around the value of modern languages that aimed essentially at protecting the sector and existing ontologies. The chapter concludes with a consideration of locality studies as a new, alternative framework through which to engage in the study of local languages and forge international connections.

Chapter 4 provides the theoretical framework for suspects’ invocations for counsel in the book’s corpus. The analysis will focus on the discursive features of suspects’ invocations for counsel during custodial interrogation, as well as the sequences of talk that follow the suspects’ invocations. This part of the analysis will use applied game theory, specifically hypergame theory, to describe police-suspect exchanges after a suspect invokes counsel. The model of the invocation game of police interrogation extends signal analysis from simple signaling games into extended conversations based on strategic objectives. This application of game theory to the invocation stage of an interrogation shows how an interrogator can manipulate a custodial suspect to change their preference to invoke counsel due to the ambiguities created by case law, which designates interrogators as arbiters of what constitutes an unequivocal invocation of the right to counsel, and stylized by formal training that encourages interrogators to engage in strategic discourse with suspects to maintain the possibility of obtaining statements.

This chapter picks up a range of applications of corpus linguistics that have not been covered in Chapters 6 and 7. These are: applications of bilingual corpora in contrastive linguistics and translation; forensic linguistics, with a particular focus on authorship; the automatic extraction of information or opinion; the identification of ‘fake news’; and the various topics discussed under the head of sociolinguistics. In most cases the work described here uses the methods discussed in earlier chapters, both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative techniques are particularly important in sociolinguistics, where the differential frequencies of items used by different social groups are important. In addition, applications such as information mining or sentiment analysis stray into computational linguistics and natural language processing, and illustrate both the common ground and the disparities between these approaches and corpus linguistics.

Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to the book, outlining the need for police investigators to engage in online identity assumption and justifying a linguistic contribution that can be made in terms of the variety of ways in which linguists and forensic linguists have approached questions of language and identity. We set out the context of online sexual abuse, in particular the abuse of children.

Finally, Chapter 7 discusses the implications of our work for the operational task of identity assumption, and for the more theoretical concerns around the linguistic individual and language and identity more generally. We conclude the chapter with our thoughts for the directions similar research might take in the future.

looks at the part emoji play in interpersonal communication. One of the aims behind their initial development was to provide a way to express those things that gestures, facial expressions, and tone of voice do in face-to-face conversation but that get lost in written communication. Emoji were seen as a way of diminishing the possibility of accidental conflict by signalling the emotional frame in which a message was meant. But they also allow for a great deal of ambiguity, and as their popularity has grown they’ve started to be used in an increasingly broad range of contexts. The chapter considers what it’s appropriate to express via emoji (and who makes these decisions). Is it deemed appropriate to use them to break up with someone? Or to send condolences about the death of a loved one? Drawing on discussions of their use by legal and political commentators, the chapter looks at how emoji have been used as evidence in legal cases and co-opted into the world of politics - so that, despite their seemingly frivolous and light-hearted roots, they’re now at the front line of debates about everything from the alt-right to post-truth politics.