Schedule 76. StuTS

Crime scene: town in Hessen. In a busy shopping street a shooting takes place. Witnesses report a fight between different groups of restaurant customers sitting on a terrace. One person is shot. Two months later we receive video recordings from the security camera of the restaurant and from a mobile phone of a neighbour. Request: a detailed transcription of the recordings. Can certain speakers be assigned to or excluded from particular utterances?
Accident scene: Columbia. A Boeing 757 from American-Airlines crashes against a mountain on its route from Miami to Cali 50km from the place of destination. Only 4 of the 155 passengers, and a dog, survive the crash. The black box (which is actually bright orange) is found and sent to linguists for analysis.
Linguistic expertise is being increasingly sought in criminal investigations or in the case of a serious accident. This talk offers an introduction to forensic phonetics, a field that is fairly young; it was only in the late 1970s in large cases like the Yorkshire Ripper case in England or the RAF-cases in Germany where linguists, phoneticians in particular, could show for the first time how investigations could profit from their expertise. Since then the field has advanced significantly. Voice-, language- and speaking characteristics are discussed that have shown to exhibit high speaker discrimination power. Speech analysis methods are demonstrated using real case samples. Finally, it is shown, how the historic dialect maps of Georg Wenker (1952-1911) stored in the archive of the Deutscher Sprachatlas here in Marburg, are still relevant for forensic investigations today.

Info

Day: 2024-11-22
Start time: 17:00
Duration: 01:00
Room: Library Lecture Hall
Track: Keynote
Language: en

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