Forensic Linguistics

Suitable for both undergraduate and graduate level courses, Gibbons' (English , Hong Kong Baptist U.) text addresses the relationship between language and the law, and reasons for that relationship. Descriptive chapters explore spoken and written language and the law, legislation and legal documents, legal interaction, the manifestation of power in the language of the law, and the linguistic reconstruction of events in legal contexts. The concepts are socially applied in chapters on the difficulty of understanding legal language, linguistic sources of disadvantage before the law and ways to handle these, legislation on language, and linguistic evidence. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

John Gibbons teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is author of Code Mixing and Code Choice (1987), editor of Language and the Law (1994), and co-editor of Learning, Keeping, and Using Language (1991). He is President of the International Association of Forensic Linguists, and is on the board of the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics and Discurso y Sociedad.