Last updated by tymon on 2008-11-06. Originally submitted by tymon on 2007-10-19.
LEXICOLOGY AND LEXICOGRAPHY SECTION
The meeting will take place on Thursday, October 25th 2007 at 5 p.m. room 102A
The speaker will be Adam Pokrywka:
Lexical norms in spoken and written dialogue in the justice system: The corpus-based approach
Abstract:
There is a plethora of cases where verbatim police interview transcripts or deposition testimony transcripts are used as strong evidence against the accused in trials. There is nothing unusual about such practices on the understanding that defendants' exact or real words are used as incriminating evidence. Unfortunately, there have been many cases where such evidence has been proven to be fabricated or unintentionally changed. To prevent similar mistakes from happening, a number of techniques for determining the authenticity of confessions and deposition testimonies have been developed in the field of linguistics. One of them is based on the assumption that convincing fabrication is very difficult to carry out, since an interview represents spoken language, whereas a forged interview represents written language.
This meeting aims at drawing a comparison between the lexis of actual and fictional dialogue under oath. The main focus of this discussion will be on the word, that is, its forms, frequency, and phraseology. Moreover, ConcApp, the concordancing program by mean of which the corpus data were processed, will be briefly presented.
