Linguistics

Something that may be of interest to forensic linguists is the recent controversy regarding Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code. John Olsson, of the Forensic Linguistics Institute has published an expert comparison of several novels at the core of this case.

Something very interesting about this is that I think this result will result in an increase of cases where students copy and paste. Why should they get punished for something that a major author can do and get away with? I don't think there's anyone who after considering the evidence can seriously come to the conclusion that Dan Brown didn't take ideas and probably even passages from other books.

This reminds me of the 2001 case around the parody novel The Wind Done Gone. Though the book is clearly a parody (which the US Supreme Court has ruled to be protected speech), a Federal district judge issued an injunction against publication. This was overturned by the appeals court, but the issue wasn't settled until there was an out of court settlement of an undisclosed sum. More information at FindLaw and Wikipedia.

Also, let's not forget that RIAA is able to charge people who distribute content for free, whereas an author who takes a book and rewrites it for profit is exonerated by the courts. This doesn't seem very consistant to me, even though I recognize that creative powers are required in the case of the author and not the file sharer.

For the record, I tend to recognize the medieval concept that it isn't a bad thing to take something that already exists and give it a new meaning. In MHG, they called it "diuten". This creative process necessarily isn't a copy of someone else's work. (Due to the nature of context, it is impossible to reproduce the context of a quote, and therefore even an accurate quote is not the same as the same passage in the original work.) Of course, passing off someone else's work as your own is not acceptable.

Haser, Verena. 2005. Metaphor, metonymy and experientialist philosophy: challenging cognitive semantics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

In this brilliant indictment of Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor (and language as metaphor), Verena Haser points out many inconsistencies and circular reasoning in the works of Lakoff and Johnson and other prominent cognitive linguists. This book is a must read for anyone who has anything to do with semantic theory or cognitive linguistics.

The synopsis taken from Amazon:

The present book provides a detailed criticism of experientialist semantics, focusing both on philosophical issues connected with experientialism and on cognitive approaches to metaphor and metonymy. Particular emphasis is placed on the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, but other cognitivists are also taken into consideration. Verena Haser proposes a new approach to the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, which contrasts with familiar cognitivist models, but also builds on some insights gained in cognitivist research. She also offers an account of metaphorical transfer which dispenses with the notion of conceptual metaphors in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson. She argues that conceptual metaphors are not a useful construct for explaining metaphorical transfer, and that the clustering of metaphorical expressions is better accounted for in terms of family resemblances between metaphorical expressions. Another major goal of this work is a reassessment of the relationship between experientialism and traditional Western philosophy (often subsumed under the vague term "objectivism"). This book contrasts with most other critical approaches to experientialism by providing close readings of key passages from the works of Lakoff and Johnson, which enables the author to pinpoint theory-internal inconsistencies and other shortcomings not noted in previous publications. This book will be relevant to students and scholars interested in semantics and cognitive linguistics, and also in psychology and philosophy of language.

(Full disclosure: I was asked to read this work at an earlier stage. I studied under Bernd Kortmann, one of the editors of the series in which this was published, at the University of Freiburg.)

Just after the IAFL conference in Cardiff, the BBC aired a documentary titled "Textual Evidence". It takes a look at several cases, many quite high profile, and looks to see how forensic linguistics can provide evidence toward guilt or innocence. It's fascinating to listen to for anyone.

For a while, the BBC was hosting a copy in their archives. However, apparently they took it down after a while. Due to the intense interest of many members of the Forensic Linguistics list, I have decided to host a copy on my server so that the documentary is not lost. Thanks to John Olson of the Forensic Linguistics Institute and Peter French of J P French Associates for providing me with the original audio.

Though I have a substantial amount of bandwidth available for this (250GB/mo), it still would be the best idea if you would download the files. If the bandwidth starts getting short, I will mirror the files on another server that has a similar amount of bandwidth available.

There are several formats. Please select the version you would like to download, right click on the link and select "Save as..." or "Save link as...", depending on your browser.

MP3

• 32kbps Mono (6.18 MB)
• 128kbps Stereo (24.7 MB)
• 320kbps Stereo (61.8 MB)

OGG

• 128kbps Stereo (31.5 MB)