This course will introduce you to the field of forensic linguistics. Forensic linguistics concerns itself with applying linguistic knowledge and methods to legal settings. It is therefore a very broad field which deals with issues like speaker identification, authorship attribution and profiling, plagiarism but also native language determination for asylum procedures, suicide notes, the authenticity of wills and fabricated evidence or manipulated transcripts of police interviews.
We will focus on selected topics within the field of forensic linguistics, namely authorship attribution, native language identification and native language determination. In doing so, we will look at linguistic theory and apply it to forensic settings, paying specific attention to scientific reliability.