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Reviewed by:
  • The language of defamation cases
  • Philip Gaines
The language of defamation cases. By Roger W. Shuy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 251. ISBN 9780195391329. $74 (Hb).

Scholarship in forensic linguistics—or, as some in the field prefer to call it, language and law—has quickly proceeded to the handbook stage. The appearance of editions by Coulthard and Johnson (2010) and Tiersma and Solan (2012), from Routledge and Oxford respectively, suggest a view of the field as transitioning into what Toulmin (1972) calls a 'compact' discipline—one whose activities are 'organized around and directed towards a specific and realistic set of agreed [End Page 669] and collective ideals' (379). Paul Newman, in his review of Coulthard & Johnson 2010, maintains that:

forensic linguistics has come of age. It is no longer a specialization practiced by a handful of scholars who just happen to have language and law interests, but rather has become a proper sub-discipline within linguistics with a core of well-trained [practitioners] and the development of special courses and degrees for students in the field.

(Newman 2011:161)

Much of the credit for this advance to maturity goes to Roger Shuy, who since 1979 has pursued the linguistic analysis of all types of language evidence in legal contexts. Beginning in 1993, S has produced a stream of monographs dealing with the language of covert police operations, suspect confessions, criminal investigations, civil disputes, and perjury.

In each of his contributions, S makes it clear that, for him, the essence of forensic linguistics is the work of applying the analytic principles of a wide range of core linguistic domains to texts and talk that form an evidentiary basis for a dispute—one in which the expertise of 'specialists in language' (3) can be of assistance to courts or enforcement agencies. In The language of defamation cases, S once again employs his method of illustrating, through accounts of his work in actual court cases, how linguistics can contribute to the interpretation of disputed language—this time the language of libel and slander. The focus is on 'defamation battles [and] disputes' (v) in the media, medicine, and business. Cases treated include lawsuits against the press and broadcast media; internecine civil disputes among competing medical practitioners; and claims against commercial interests, employers, and unions. In almost every chapter, the pattern is the same: a brief synopsis of how the dispute arose, exemplification of the language in question, the linguistic analysis itself, and some concluding remarks—sometimes personal—about the implications of the analysis for the legal system or the interface of language and the law. A partial list of the heuristic lenses—sometimes eclectic and/or informal—through which S looks at alleged defamatory language includes lexical and structural ambiguity, attribution of intent, conveyed meaning, the cooperative principle, discourse structure, figures of speech, reference, inference, illocutionary and perlocutionary force, speech acts, intonation, and thematic and topical analysis. Most of the analyses recruit several of these approaches, depending on the nature of the interpretive task. A closer look at one of S's treatments will give a flavor of his method.

S recounts a case in which (in the words of Ch. 5's title) the 'Widow of a murdered man sues a localTVstation'(55). Following the 1993 fatal shooting of a Minnesota man, the deputy sheriff investigating the case had been unable to come up with adequate evidence to connect the man's wife—the prime suspect—to the crime. This did not keep him, however, from sharing his deep suspicions of her guilt with reporters from a local television station and a nationally syndicated news program. In a claim of defamation, the widow brought suit against the deputy, the county, and various media interests. The claim focused on allegedly defamatory comments made by the deputy, interviewers, and reporters during two television broadcasts. In response, the defendants claimed 'that the disputed communications were speculation and opinion that are incapable of being proved false and therefore do not convey an actionable defamatory meaning' (58). In S's opinion, however, 'four discourse features [of the relevant interview comments] can lead listeners to believe that the defendants accused [the plaintiff] of being the actual...

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