Roger W. Shuy
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195391329
- eISBN:
- 9780199866274
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195391329.003.0008
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Sociolinguistics / Anthropological Linguistics
Analysis of the language evidence is not the only task of forensic linguists in defamation cases. Sometimes their main role is to examine the reports and testimony of experts on the other side. This ...
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Analysis of the language evidence is not the only task of forensic linguists in defamation cases. Sometimes their main role is to examine the reports and testimony of experts on the other side. This chapter is a linguistic analysis of the plaintiff's expert witness's report, in which that expert went outside the appropriate limits of expertise to attribute what the readers actually understood and to attribute what the writer actually intended. That report also called on professional expertise that was outside of his linguistic training and expertise and organized his report in a less than coherent manner. This chapter also discusses the inherent problems of accusations stemming from innuendo and newspaper headlines.Less
Analysis of the language evidence is not the only task of forensic linguists in defamation cases. Sometimes their main role is to examine the reports and testimony of experts on the other side. This chapter is a linguistic analysis of the plaintiff's expert witness's report, in which that expert went outside the appropriate limits of expertise to attribute what the readers actually understood and to attribute what the writer actually intended. That report also called on professional expertise that was outside of his linguistic training and expertise and organized his report in a less than coherent manner. This chapter also discusses the inherent problems of accusations stemming from innuendo and newspaper headlines.
Roger W. Shuy
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195391329
- eISBN:
- 9780199866274
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195391329.003.0013
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Sociolinguistics / Anthropological Linguistics
An employee's resignation from her very responsible position in a company was followed by a series of ongoing contractual relationships, to which many other employees objected to her continuation. ...
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An employee's resignation from her very responsible position in a company was followed by a series of ongoing contractual relationships, to which many other employees objected to her continuation. Letters widely published by the company provided the basis for the employee's defamation case against the company. At the request of counsel, the description of this case is annonymized. It also illustrates that when an expert's analysis does not help the lawyer, the expert should withdraw from the case as soon as possible.Less
An employee's resignation from her very responsible position in a company was followed by a series of ongoing contractual relationships, to which many other employees objected to her continuation. Letters widely published by the company provided the basis for the employee's defamation case against the company. At the request of counsel, the description of this case is annonymized. It also illustrates that when an expert's analysis does not help the lawyer, the expert should withdraw from the case as soon as possible.
Patrick Hanks
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780262018579
- eISBN:
- 9780262312851
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262018579.001.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Syntax and Morphology
This book offers a wide-ranging empirical investigation of word use and meaning in language. It fills the need for a lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach that will help people ...
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This book offers a wide-ranging empirical investigation of word use and meaning in language. It fills the need for a lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach that will help people understand how words go together in collocational patterns and constructions to make meanings. Such an approach is now possible, the book argues, because of the availability of new forms of evidence (corpora, the Internet) and the development of new methods of statistical analysis and inferencing. The book offers a new theory of language, the theory of norms and exploitations, which makes a systematic distinction between normal and abnormal usage—between rules for using words normally and rules for exploiting such norms in metaphor and other creative use of language. Using hundreds of citations from corpora and other texts, it shows how matching each use of a word against established contextual patterns plays a large part in determining the meaning of an utterance. The book's goal is to develop a coherent and practical lexically driven theory of language that takes into account the immense variability of everyday usage, and which shows that this variability is rule governed rather than random. Such a theory will complement other theoretical approaches to language, including cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, generative lexicon theory, priming theory, and pattern grammar.Less
This book offers a wide-ranging empirical investigation of word use and meaning in language. It fills the need for a lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach that will help people understand how words go together in collocational patterns and constructions to make meanings. Such an approach is now possible, the book argues, because of the availability of new forms of evidence (corpora, the Internet) and the development of new methods of statistical analysis and inferencing. The book offers a new theory of language, the theory of norms and exploitations, which makes a systematic distinction between normal and abnormal usage—between rules for using words normally and rules for exploiting such norms in metaphor and other creative use of language. Using hundreds of citations from corpora and other texts, it shows how matching each use of a word against established contextual patterns plays a large part in determining the meaning of an utterance. The book's goal is to develop a coherent and practical lexically driven theory of language that takes into account the immense variability of everyday usage, and which shows that this variability is rule governed rather than random. Such a theory will complement other theoretical approaches to language, including cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, generative lexicon theory, priming theory, and pattern grammar.
Scott Atran
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198524021
- eISBN:
- 9780191689093
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198524021.003.0008
- Subject:
- Psychology, Cognitive Psychology
This chapter discusses aspects of domain-specific thinking, including categorization and causal inferencing from conceptual categories, within and across cultures. It focuses on the structure of ...
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This chapter discusses aspects of domain-specific thinking, including categorization and causal inferencing from conceptual categories, within and across cultures. It focuses on the structure of categories in the domain of biology, such as the organization of taxonomic relations that hold between cat and mammal or oak and tree. It examines the extent to which this categorical structure constrains inferences that causally relate biological taxa to one another, and the extent to which culturally specific belief systems, or theories are able to modify that structure and hence change the nature of biological reasoning.Less
This chapter discusses aspects of domain-specific thinking, including categorization and causal inferencing from conceptual categories, within and across cultures. It focuses on the structure of categories in the domain of biology, such as the organization of taxonomic relations that hold between cat and mammal or oak and tree. It examines the extent to which this categorical structure constrains inferences that causally relate biological taxa to one another, and the extent to which culturally specific belief systems, or theories are able to modify that structure and hence change the nature of biological reasoning.
Hugo Bowles
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- February 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198829072
- eISBN:
- 9780191872648
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198829072.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter focuses on the reading of the ‘despotic’ Gurney script, which was so different from the Roman script that Dickens was used to decoding (section 3.1). It explores how Dickens was able to ...
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This chapter focuses on the reading of the ‘despotic’ Gurney script, which was so different from the Roman script that Dickens was used to decoding (section 3.1). It explores how Dickens was able to emerge from his initial state of bewilderment, described in David Copperfield as a ‘sea of perplexity’, by training himself in visualizing its character shapes (section 3.2), sounding out the missing vowel sounds in the Gurney script (section 3.3), and inferencing their meaning (section 3.4). The process of decoding Gurney is then compared to episodes from Dickens’s own childhood reading at home and at school (section 3.5). The chapter argues that the Gurney system’s extra level of coding, which involved the graphic representation of letters rather than sounds, drastically diminished its learnability. Dickens’s undeciphered shorthand letters are used to illustrate these difficulties.Less
This chapter focuses on the reading of the ‘despotic’ Gurney script, which was so different from the Roman script that Dickens was used to decoding (section 3.1). It explores how Dickens was able to emerge from his initial state of bewilderment, described in David Copperfield as a ‘sea of perplexity’, by training himself in visualizing its character shapes (section 3.2), sounding out the missing vowel sounds in the Gurney script (section 3.3), and inferencing their meaning (section 3.4). The process of decoding Gurney is then compared to episodes from Dickens’s own childhood reading at home and at school (section 3.5). The chapter argues that the Gurney system’s extra level of coding, which involved the graphic representation of letters rather than sounds, drastically diminished its learnability. Dickens’s undeciphered shorthand letters are used to illustrate these difficulties.
