LINGUIST List 3.545

Tue 30 Jun 1992

Disc: Free Indirect Discourse

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1. William J. Rapaport, Re: 3.530 Sister Souljah--free indirect discourse
2. Sue Blackwell, Re: Free Indirect Discourse and Forensic Linguistics

Message 1: Re: 3.530 Sister Souljah--free indirect discourse

Readers of the debate on free indirect discourse might be interested in
a computational approach to the problem. For references, see:

Wiebe, Janyce M., & Rapaport, William J. (1988),
``A Computational Theory of Perspective and Reference in Narrative''
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (SUNY Buffalo)
(Morristown, NJ.: Association for Computational Linguistics): 131--138.

Wiebe, Janyce M. (1990), ``Recognizing Subjective Sentences: A Computational
Investigation of Narrative Text,'' Technical Report 90-03
(Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science).

Wiebe, Janyce M. (1991), "References in Narrative Text", NOUS, Special Issue on
Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 25: 457-486.

			William J. Rapaport
			Associate Professor of Computer Science
			and
			Center for Cognitive Science

Dept. of Computer Science||internet: rapaportcs.buffalo.edu
SUNY Buffalo		 ||bitnet: rapaportsunybcs.bitnet
Buffalo, NY 14260	 ||uucp: {rutgers,uunet}!cs.buffalo.edu!rapaport
(716) 636-3193, 3180 ||fax: (716) 636-3464

Ron Smyth asks, referring to the analysis of Sister Souljah's
speech as "Free Indirect Discourse", whether this kind of
analysis holds up in court.

Linguists in many countries are finding themselves increasingly
called on to give evidence in court as "expert witnesses". The
area of Forensic Phonetics is already well-established, but cases
like that of Sister Souljah require other kinds of linguistic
expertise, and in recognition of this need some of us are in the
process of setting up an International Association of Forensic
Linguists (provisional title) whose aims so far include:

- collecting a Bibliography of relevant research;
- compiling a Register of forensic linguists who are willing
 and able to make their services available to the legal profession;
- educating the legal profession about linguistics;
- drawing up a Code of Practice on matters such as giving evidence
 in court, writing official reports etc;
- collecting a computer corpus of statements, confessions, police
 language, etc., which could be used to back up judgements about,
 e.g., the likely source of a contested part of a confession.

The First British Seminar on Forensic Linguistics was held in
March this year at the University of Birmingham, and was attended
by delegates from Australia, Brazil, Eire, Holland, Greece, Ukraine
and Germany as well as the U.K. There was a consensus that an
international association was needed, and it was from this seminar
that the IAFL was born.

There will be a one day seminar in Birmingham on November 14th 1992
and a conference in Bonn in mid July next year.

The IAFL does not yet have a formal constitution or a comittee, but
a caretaker committee is meeting regularly and working towards these
ends.

If you would like to be kept informed about developments and future
seminars/conferences organised by the IAFL, OR if you have any
statements/confessions we could use in our corpus (preferably in
electronic form), please send a brief
e-mail message to: sueuk.ac.bham.rduels

Malcolm Coulthard Sue Blackwell

School of English, University of Birmingham, U.K.