Fighting over words: Language and civil law cases (review)

In Peter Tiersma and Lawrence Solan's March 2001 Language article, 'The linguist on the witness stand: Forensic linguistics in American courts', it was noted that Roger Shuy had 'written two books describing some of his experiences' (221) as a linguist giving expert opinions in court cases. In the ensuing seven years, S's number of titles in the field—all monographs—has grown to seven. In Fighting over words: Language and civil law cases, his latest, S discusses and demonstrates how linguistics can be used to help resolve civil disputes over meaning, comprehensibility, clarity, and intentionality in a wide range of text types: contracts, advertisements, product labels, manuals, corporate communication, trademarks, and copyrighted material. With this book, S extends into yet another area his use of linguistic tools to offer expert opinion where matters of language are at issue.

More than any other scholar working at the interface of language and law, S has exemplified the uses to which linguistics can be put in the legal arena. In his first book, Language crimes:The use and abuse of language evidence in the courtroom, S used principles drawn from speech act theory, conversation analysis, politeness theory, discourse analysis, and topic analysis to tease out meaning and intentionality in police tape recordings of individuals suspected or accused of such 'language crimes' as bribery, threats, and perjury. In The language of confession, interrogation, and deception, S examined the form and style of the language of police interrogators and their suspects to determine the degree of manipulation performed by the questioners and the amount of deception/truthfulness of their respondents. Bureaucratic language in government and business explored problems of meaning and comprehensibility in a wide range of documents and forms used by both governmental and commercial entities, with an eye toward making such documents more transparent for consumers. In Linguistic battles in trademark disputes, S showed how virtually all of the core areas of theoretical linguistics can be brought to bear in helping resolve legal conflicts in which claims to the ownership of words, phrases, and symbols are contested.

S returned to the domain of law enforcement in Creating language crimes: How law enforcement uses (and misuses) language—this time to analyze the language of undercover operatives and their suspect targets, using discourse- and conversation-analysis techniques to reveal the ways in which law enforcement personnel manipulate verbal interaction in order to create the appearance of guilt. In a break from his discussions of actual cases, S wrote Linguistics in the courtroom: A practical guide, essentially an advice manual for new and prospective forensic linguists, based on his extensive experience doing the kind of work he reports on in the previous five books—and now the subsequent one, Fighting over words (FOW).

S's approach in FOW, which 'has three obvious audiences: lawyers, linguists, and students' (5), is a familiar one to those acquainted with his work. First, he begins with an introduction contextualizing the book's material in both law and linguistics. S sets the stage by positing 'three levels of language consciousness' (3): (i) the automatic/unconscious in everyday life, where language is 'practically invisible' to users; (ii) the quasi-conscious on the part of those who use language publicly or professionally, including in business and government; and (iii) the acutely conscious where language is being scrutinized and analyzed—as, for example, in civil disputes. S then proceeds to the bulk of the work: descriptions of actual civil cases he has worked on—giving the background of the issue in play, explaining what was at stake in the litigation, excerpting segments of text/transcription relevant to the case, and then carefully talking the reader through the essentials of the linguistic analysis.

The eighteen cases are grouped together under the rubrics of business contract disputes, deceptive trade practices, product liability, copyright infringement, discrimination, and trademarks. The length of the treatments varies between six and twenty pages, depending on the amount of data needed to...