Les normes sociolinguistiques et leur changement:La légitimation en cours du français québécois dans la littérature gallicane

Different disciplinary fields in the humanities have started to formulate the question of the representations by one community of the linguistic practices of some other communities with which a common language is nonetheless shared. This question is considered through the way in which Quebec French is represented in two recent detective novels from France French authors. Two rhetorical strategies are evidenced. A realist strategy presents Quebec French as a differential practice and cannot escape reasserting the symbolic asymmetry between a so-called peripheral variety and the central variety from which the author is writing. A moderation strategy brings together practices from different groups without identifying them as such. The study further allows us to document the apparent reduction in the linguistic insecurity of the Quebec French community, through the reception of the first strategy in particular.

Forensic linguistics : the application of language description in legal contexts

In this article I first divide Forensic Linguistics into three sub-disciplines: the language of written legal texts, the spoken language of legal proceedings, and the linguist as expert witness and then go on to give a small number of examples of the research undertaken in these three areas. For the language of written legal texts, I present work on the (in) comprehensibility of police cautions and of judges instructions to juries. For the spoken language of legal proceedings, I report work on the problems of interpreted interaction, of vulnerable witnesses and the need for more detailed research comparing the interactive rules in adversarial and investigative systems. Finally, to illustrate the role of the linguist as expert witness I report a trademark case, five different authorship attribution cases, three very different plagiarism cases and I end reporting briefly the contribution of linguists to language assessment techniques used in the linguistic classification of asylum seekers. © Langage et société no 132 - juin 2010.