Linguistic Evidence

With the permission of a North Carolina court, more than 150 hours of courtroom speech were recorded for this study. These tapes provided a rich archive for a variety of different types of inquiry, including the ethnography of courtroom speech and social psychological experiments focused on effects of different modes of presenting information in courts of law. Four sets of linguistic variables and related experimental studies have constituted a major portion of the research: (1) "powerful" versus "powerless" speech; (2) hypercorrect versus formal speech; (3) narrative versus fragmented testimony, and (4) simultaneous speech by witnesses and lawyers. All four sets of studies focus on the central question of importance of form over content of testimony.

Review text: "A volume which has indeed presented a rich picture of the role of linguistic evidence in the contemporary, especially generative, study of language."Gerard Steen in: Functions of Language 1/2007.

The renaissance of corpus linguistics and promising developments in experimental linguistic techniques in recent years have led to a remarkable revival of interest in issues of the empirical base of linguistic theory in general, and the status of different kinds of linguistic evidence in particular. Consensus is growing (a) that even so-called primary data (from introspection as well as authentic language production) are inherently complex performance data only indirectly reflecting the subject of linguistic theory, (b) that for an appropriate foundation of linguistic theories evidence from different sources such as introspective data, corpus data, data from (psycho-)linguistic experiments, historical and diachronic data, typological data, neurolinguistic data and language learning data are not only welcome but also often necessary. It is in particular by contrasting evidence from different sources with respect to particular research questions that we may gain a deeper understanding of the status and quality of the individual types of linguistic evidence on the one hand, and of their mutual relationship and respective weight on the other. The present volume is a collection of (selected) papers presented at the conference on 'Linguistic Evidence' in Tübingen 2004, which was explicitly devoted to the above issues. All of them address these issues in relation to specific linguistic research problems, thereby helping to establish a better understanding of the nature of linguistic evidence in particularly insightful ways.

For the past few decades a growing number of scholars have attempted to overthrow the traditional Wellhausian view that the so-called 'Yahwist' or 'J' source of the Pentateuch is the oldest of the four major sources. These scholars have argued that J was composed during the exilic or post-exilic periods of ancient Israel. Their arguments have focused on the literary, historiographic, and theological characteristics of 'J'. This book attempts to re-evaluate on linguistic grounds such efforts to place the Yahwist source in the exilic or post-exilic periods. The study employs the methodology developed most prominently by Avi Hurvitz for identifying characteristic features of post-exilic Hebrew ('Late Biblical Hebrew'). This divides the language of the Hebrew Bible into three main chronological stages: Archaic Biblical Hebrew (ABH), Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH), and Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH). Wright examines 40 features of J for which useful comparisons can be made to LBH and finds no evidence of LBH in the entire Yahwist source. Therefore it is unlikely that J was composed during the post-exilic period. Moreover since Hurvitz has shown that the exilic period was a time of transition between SBH and LBH such that late features began to occur in exilic texts, the author concludes on linguistic grounds that J was most likely composed during the pre-exilic period of ancient Israel.

What counts as evidence in linguistics? This question is addressed by the contributions to the present volume (originally published as a Special Issue of Studies in Language 28:3 (2004). Focusing on the innateness debate, what is illustrated is how formal and functional approaches to linguistics have different perspectives on linguistic evidence. While special emphasis is paid to the status of typological evidence and universals for the construction of Universal Grammar (UG), this volume also highlights more general issues such as the roles of (non)-standard language and historical evidence. To address the overall topic, the following three guiding questions are raised: What type of evidence can be used for innateness claims (or UG)?; What is the content of such innate features (or UG)?; and, How can UG be used as a theory guiding empirical research? A combination of articles and peer commentaries yields a lively discussion between leading representatives of formal and functional approaches.

Overview of the interface of language and the law, illustrated with authentic data and contemporary case studies. Topics include collection of evidence, discourse, courtroom interaction, legal language, comprehension and forensic phonetics.