34.2463, Review: The Linguistics of Crime

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2463. Thu Aug 10 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2463, Review: The Linguistics of Crime

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Date: 08-Jul-2023
From: Olamide Eniola [oeniola at tulane.edu]
Subject: Applied Linguistics, Pragmatics: Douthwaite, Tabbert (eds.) 


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.394

EDITOR: John Douthwaite
EDITOR: Ulrike Tabbert
TITLE: The Linguistics of Crime
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Olamide Eniola

SUMMARY
The Linguistics of Crime is a collection of fifteen chapters edited by
John Douthwaite and Ulrike Tabbert, which explore how language works
in crime texts. Right at the introduction by the editors, it becomes
clear that the volume illuminates how crime and the perception of
crime are represented across texts, text types, text genres, cultures,
and legal systems. Even though the volume does not study real crime
and criminals, its focus on linguistic analysis allows each of the
contributors to explore the plethora of texts – fiction novels,
poetry, offenders' accounts of wrongdoings, legal documents, and news
– available about crime and to make assertions about how language
constructs the crime discourse.
The cognitive linguistic construction and analysis of Otherness open
the discussions in this volume. Central to this opening discussion are
the questions: how do we conceptualize the relationship between self
and the other, and on what basis is Otherness created? Starting with
the discussion of the Other, Kovecses and Douthwaite show that
metonymic thinking and metaphoric labeling influence how humans
categorize 'we-other'. We stereotype, defamiliarize, and demonize the
Other through these cognitive activities. Following these
observations, the authors argued that crime, criminality, labeling,
and negative evaluation are instantiations of Otherness. In their
examination of two literary works – Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy and
Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner – and a
film – Nil by Mouth - Kovecses and Douthwaite suggest that crime is
not only an expression of Otherness but also can be an oppositional,
ideological, social, and class conflict between the haves and the have
nots and the superiors and the inferiors.
In Chapter 3, Monika Fludernik continues discussing metaphors, but
this time within the context of human experience of confinement. While
seeking to know how prisons are imagined metaphorically, what
attribute certain situations have that make them prison-like, and what
features of incarceration get foregrounded, Fludernik examines
carceral metaphors beyond prisons and inmates to include restrictions
people experience in various socio-political and ideological contexts.
Running a search through the Literature Online (LION) database,
Fludernik shows the prevalence of prison metaphors in abstract
concepts (like religion), ideas (mind), emotions (jealousy), and
social rules. Drawing heavily on PRISON IS FILTH/SEWER and PRISON AS
WILDERNESS/JUNGLE tropes, the author argues that prison metaphors
focus on inmates and their immorality, thus justifying prison as a
place of misery and suffering for incarcerated criminals while
deflecting attention from the prison and legal system.
How the Golden Age produces two different literary cultures in Britain
and the United States starts John Douthwaite's discussion of ideology
in crime fiction in Chapter 4. The author observes that while the
British fiction writing culture remains conservative by not debating
social issues, the literary culture in the United States is more
socio-politically oriented, constantly criticizing the system averse
to justice. Beyond its entertainment value, Douthwaite conceives crime
fiction, drawing on crime novels and television series by Agatha
Christies and Caroline Graham, as a site of ideological and discursive
struggle. One other major concern in the chapter is how Graham
positions readers in crime fiction, especially how her character
portrayal both conveys her ideology and, at the same time, invites
readers to share the same ideology. The chapter concludes by analyzing
the stylistic devices, namely, speech and thought presentation, by
which Graham influences readers' perception and Narrative Report of
Speech Act and Free Direct Thought to make them directly experience
the intensity of characters' thoughts and emotions.
In Chapter 5, where discussions about crime and victimhood open,
Christiana Gregoriou explores the crime of child trafficking by
showing what victims of the crime experience. Through a critical and
stylistic analysis of Minette Walter's The Cellar, Gregoriou shows how
literary texts create awareness about human trafficking through the
experience of an eight-year-old Muna. Even though Walter depicts
(Muna's) trafficking alongside her traffickers, the Sangolis, as a
problem imported into the UK by foreigners, Gregoriou's analysis
suggests that such representation, where transnational trafficking is
othered, fails to account for global inequality and domestic
structural causes of the crime. Furthermore, the author identifies
Muna's focalized third-person narration of speech presentation (which
shows Muna's lack of control over the abusive way others speak
about/to her), naming strategies (her captors use in describing her),
her animalistic metaphors (to describe her captors), transitivity and
(deontic) modality as linguistic devices which give readers a sense of
Muna's imprisonment and limiting living conditions as a 'female,
non-white, young, sexualised' (102) victim. Yet within such a
narrative of modern-day slavery, Muna breaks free of her limiting
conditions to retaliate against her captors. Such vindictive action of
a supposed victim, Gregoriou argues, problematizes the distinction
between 'victim' and 'abuser' in narratives about trafficking.
The conversation about the victim of crime wraps up in Chapter 6 as
Mahmood Kadir Ibrahim and Urlike Tabbert analyze the linguistic
construction of political crimes and victims in the Kurdish-Iraqi war.
The peculiarity of the Kurdish-Iraqi war analyzed in this chapter is
that when no victim is specified, the offender is unnamed. Drawing an
extract from Sherko Bekas' poem, The Small Mirrors, Ibrahim and
Tabbert argue that 'due to a binary opposition between victims and
perpetrators' (109), the offenders are present even when not
explicitly mentioned in the poem analyzed. The authors employ critical
stylistics (Jeffries, 2010) to identify ideological meaning in Beka's
poems and to explore the construction of victims. They observe that,
through linguistic prioritizing – passive transformation – Bekas
foregrounds the recipients of atrocities, namely the victims, in the
subject position and leaves the reader to fill in the missing link of
the unnamed offender. While noting that the political victimization
under consideration involves killing people and nature, Ibrahim and
Tabbert argue for the place of Bekas' poem in resisting the hegemonic
discourse of political crime.
How translation and adaptation have become ways of increasing
accessibility and recreating crime fiction, respectively, are the
thematic preoccupations in Chapters 7 and 8. In his discussion of
'Stylistic Aspects of Detective Fiction in Translation,' Simon Zupan
creates awareness about the stylistic, cultural, and literary
differences between two languages in translation. In answering the
question, 'How does style travel between languages, cultures, and
literary systems?' especially in detective fiction, Zupan delves into
analyzing what is lost and gained during the process of translation,
how the stylistic norms and constraints of the target language affect
those of the source text and how stylistic translation shifts affect
the reception of detective fiction. The chapter discusses Edgar Allan
Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue and two of its translations in
Slovenian. Even though translational stylistics places more importance
on the source text and not on the translator's personal style, Zupan
observes several stylistic shifts – some of which include a change in
modality, transitivity pattern, and register – in Slovenian
translations of Poe's short story, most of which are the translators'
intervention. These shifts, Zupan argues, are 'mandated by the
language-systemic difference between English and Slovenian' (130). The
chapter demonstrates the applicability of translational stylistics for
crime fiction translation and its usefulness for literary translators.
In Chapter 8, Anne Furlong explores transnational adaptions of
Sherlock Holmes' stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. In illuminating crime
text adaptions, Furlong goes beyond Zupan to show that a translated
text is an adaptation of the source text, allowing adaptors to augment
and alter contexts of source works and their audience to develop
cognitive readings beyond source works. Contrary to the prevalence of
fidelity in adaptation studies, Furlong opines that the 'adaptor has
no duty to 'respect' the sources, except as this serves their
communicative purpose' (151). To this end, the author uses relevance
theory, which guides audiences to the optimal assumptions in utterance
as either intended or unintended by the communicator, to show that
'adaptations constitute an independent and original communicative act
neither restricted to nor constrained by the intended interpretation
of the earlier text' (156); adaptation is unlike translation where a
translator is restricted by and speaks for the author. To argue for
the independence of adaptation, Furlong discusses Maslennikov's 1981
Russian-language film of The Hound of the Baskervilles and the
HBO-Asia series Miss Sherlock to show various transmediated,
historical, and cultural domestications of Sherlock Holmes in Russian
and Japanese narratives. The author observes that the Russian and
Japanese adaptations of Sherlock Holmes have succeeded because
adaptors modify and revise source texts for their own communicative
purposes, taking their own audiences into consideration' (171).
Making claims to victimhood is a socially negotiated process, yet one
wonders what happens when the claim to victimhood is not approved by
the public. In Chapter 9, M'Balia Thomas investigates the role of
broadcast content and narrative structure on public perception of and
response to a claim of victimization. Relying on a television
interview, The Bed Intruder, Thomas explicates victim testimonials by
siblings, Antoine and Kelly Dodson, whose claim to rape by a bed
intruder becomes parodied, thus excluding the Dodsons from the  public
compassion, respect, and social concern due to victims. The central
question of the chapter is: how is the claim to victimhood mediated,
and how does this mediation shape public perception? Drawing on Text
World Theory (Gavins 2007; Werth 1999), by which the context of
discourse production and reception reveals textual and conceptual
structures, Thomas analyses the textual cues in live broadcast
reporting and voice-over narration, which endorse or depart from the
victims' narrative. The theory reveals how broadcast discourse invites
or closes off narrative roles for viewers. In a situation where
narrative voice-overs and structures depart from public responses to
and victims' claims to victimization in The Bed Intruder, the author
argues that such revoicing, retelling, and rekeying, which is at
temporal, locative, and epistemic distance to the discourse world of
participants, raise ethical concerns.
In Chapter 10, Simon Statham analyses a scene from David Chase's crime
drama, The Sopranos, to exemplify how dramatic dialogue works with
audiovisual techniques (like camera shot, gaze, and action) in crime
telecinematic discourse. Adopting a multimodal stylistic analysis,
Grice's maxims of relation and quantity, and Goffman's participation
framework, the chapter weaves together a blend of analysis of camera
shots, gaze and action of characters, and the conversational
intentions of characters engaged in crime talk. As Statham's analysis
shows, characters engaged in crime opt out of the cooperative
principle by refusing to acknowledge incriminating conversational
topics and to provide confirmation, acknowledgment, or additional
information when quizzed by the authorities. In a multimodal stylistic
analysis, the author shows that the meaning of dialogue is enhanced
when the attention is not only on the characters' dialogue but also on
their gestures and actions. Furthermore, Statham uses multimodal
stylistic analysis to demonstrate how betrayal is exposed in a crime
talk.
Because Rio funk, especially the proibidao genre, mostly eulogizes
armed groups in its lyrics while also challenging the state's
authority in Brazil, it is often criminalized, stigmatized, and
perceived as anti-social by the authorities. Therefore, Andrea Mayr,
in Chapter 11, draws on Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic
Functional Grammar, and Appraisal Theory to analyze some funk lyrics,
arguing that 'funk proibidao … addresses and recontextualises the
imbrications of state and criminal violence' (214), which the media
and public discourse are often silent about. Through discourse
analysis, ethnography, and informal interviews, Mayr argues that funk
proibidao is a tool that the underprivileged youth produce and perform
to articulate their favela's life identity and experience of
marginalization. The author shows how, as a counter-hegemonic
discourse,  the criminalized music genre functions as  a site for the
underprivileged youth both to contest the dominant socio-cultural
order that excludes them and to create a space for themselves.
In Chapter 12, Ulrike Tabbert, exploring the intersection of crime,
linguistics, and psychology, shows the linguistic patterns that
characterize the mind style of a person with schizophrenia. In other
words, through a stylistic analysis, Tabbert shows how the personal
and cognitive worldview of schizophrenia manifests in writings. Even
though Fowler (1977) coins' mind style' to focus on fictional
characters, Tabbert's use of it in analyzing a real John Doe's writing
reveals how applicable the concept is to authentic texts and in
explaining 'how a person with mental disturbance perceives his
criminal act' (256) however petty or serious. Tabbert's analysis shows
that John Doe's mind style is characterized by a wrong interpretation
of others' behavior based on his mind deficit. Linguistically, his
writing contains an excessive use of first-person pronouns arising
from over self-awareness and self-focus, a preference for mental
processes above material processes, a preference for epistemic
modality, which allows him to express his motives for the crime, and
extensive use of negation. As Tabbert argues, John Doe fails to
process information correctly due to his deficits in social
encounters. Owing to his preference for mental processes, John Doe's
experience of body feelings transcends other people's body experience.
Consequently, Tabbert's analysis of metaphorical choices shows that
John Doe prefers source domains that are related to the human body and
its sensory abilities, thus making him relate everything to his body:
'MENTAL PERCEPTION/COGNITION IS BODILY EXPERIENCE' (273).
The important role metaphor plays in the professional use of legal
language is the focus of Douglas Mark and Marco Canepa in Chapter 13.
The authors aim to argue for the centrality of metaphor in the
composition of, in talking about, in accepting, and in modifying
concepts in legal discourse. The discussions distinguish between a
view of law as an all-inclusive code to be applied – an Aristotelian
application of perfect logic – and one which privileges interpretation
and conviction through verbal processes – a Giovani Tarello's stance.
However, because legal speech has several meanings requiring
interpretation, metaphors are deployed in such speech as
rhetorical/persuasive figures rather than tools for logical reasoning.
As metaphors must be made and interpreted, their use in legal
discourse suggests that legal proceedings are subjective. Using data
from volumes of the Cambridge Law Journal (CLJ) from 2016 to 2019, the
authors identify instances of metaphorical language and their
functional role in the structure of legal argumentation. Mark and
Canepa show how metaphors form deontological propositions which
advance certain positionality in legal discussions. Overall, the
authors use the chapter to explain the role metaphors play in helping
us understand complicated legal matters.
What happens when financial regulators and investigators become guilty
of the crime they are tasked to adjudicate? In Chapter 14, Ilse Ras
examines how British newspapers report regulators and investigators on
corporate fraud. Focusing on the news reports between 2004 and 2014,
Ras shows how two leading regulatory bodies tasked with regulating and
investigating crime in financial markets, the UK-based Financial
Services Authority and the US-based Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC),  are portrayed in the news. Using a mix of Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA) and corpus study (of corporate fraud news), the author
assesses the portrayal of the agencies and the word choices in
referring to them to show whether news reports enhance or negate the
legitimacy of the agencies in regulating financial institutions in the
UK and the US. Analysis shows that the regulators are personified,
metaphorized as animals (watchdogs), and generally constructed as
functional agents of Material Action Intentional (MAI) where they
launch investigations, authorize banks, and bring lawsuits. Given the
linguistic agency role of the regulators, Ras shows that 'banks' and
'companies' are constant collocates of 'regulators' and that they are
the targets (the Goals) of the regulatory processes. Because news
reports sometimes cast judgments on issues under focus (see Chapter
9), the author argues that the prevalence of deontic modals in
reporting the agencies suggests that the regulators are not
implementing the law as they should; thus, leading banks and companies
to survive through wrongdoing. The chapter lives up to its title by
diffusing the blame for citizens' exploitation by banks and companies
on the financial regulators.
Finally, John Douthwaite rounds up the conversation by examining
ideology in critical crime fiction in Chapter 15. Using the television
series Inspector George Gently, Douthwaite exemplifies critical crime
fiction via its ideological workings and the linguistic techniques it
uses in positioning readers/viewers.

EVALUATION
As stated by the editors of this volume, 'the application of
linguistic analysis to a range of crime-related text types…is
extremely rare in crime studies' (3). Despite filling that gap through
(critical) stylistics, critical discourse analysis, ethnography, and
metaphorical analysis, among others, this volume still shows us how
linguistics intersects with literature, sociology, forensic
psychology, law, rhetoric, and finances. As a result, I consider how
the volume integrates these various methods, theories, and fields in
analyzing crime texts as its major achievement. Relatedly, the volume
features various genres of texts. From crime fiction, crime talk, song
lyrics, news broadcast, to newspaper reports, to mention a few, these
texts not only imitate authentic crime situations but also make
readers see how various text genres encode crime. Contributors to this
volume can be categorized into public prosecutors and professors of
Linguistics/English Language. This varied background of authors
breathes freshness into scholarship in linguistics. While thirteen
chapters treat crime within the broader context of various linguistic
theories, Chapters 12 and 13 tilt toward studying crime within
psychology and legal discourse. One can argue that the volume shows
that scholarship in linguistics, when immersed in researching vices
confronting human society, can be multidisciplinary and can attract
perspectives from fields least imagined.
While contributions of the volume are numerous, it is worth pointing
to a few areas where a little attention could increase the work's
appeal. One expects a book on crime to feature more than the written
mode of communication in depicting the various crimes discussed. Apart
from the cover page and a few figures, readers encounter no multimodal
means of communication while reading the book. This is even more
telling for those chapters that are multimodal (Chapter 10) and
ethnographic (11) in orientation. I believe using pictures from The
Sopranos and funk ethnography would complement discussions in those
chapters. Similarly, I consider discussions about stylistic shifts in
Chapter 7, especially between pp. 124-145, a total of 21 pages, dense.
Because of the importance of that section to this volume, one expects
to see the section split into manageable sections, which would make
reading and comprehension easier.
Overall, the quality of research in this volume outweighs its
shortcomings. Those interested in crime, linguistics (especially
stylistics, CDA, and linguistic anthropology), and translation studies
will find it useful. Despite its focus on crime, the volume is
theoretically grounded and ethically compliant. Given the plethora of
studies on crime in criminology, sociology, and economics, this volume
shows what is missing when perspectives from linguistics are not yet
considered in studying crime. Without studying real crime and
criminals, this volume aptly shows that 'there exists an immense
parallel world of discourse on crime' (2) to be explored. As a
linguistic anthropologist interested in the ethnography of news
production and reception of terrorism, I find every discussion about
crime relevant, as the volume offers insight into news (both broadcast
and print) and other texts about crime.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Olamide Eniola is a PhD Candidate in Linguistic Anthropology at Tulane
University. His research interests include language and discursive
practices around news production and reception. He is currently on his
fieldwork in Nigeria.



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