Working in Language and Law is a detailed account of the forensic linguistic work done by the author in the last 35 years. It provides exemplary insights into an ever-expanding field of expert testimony, focusing on the situation in Germany since the seventies and covering all major areas of the field.
This book deals with various «indigenous» traditions of grammatical thought across the globe. Its main perspective is a cross-cultural sociolinguistic and anthropological linguistic account of «Indigenous Grammar». The concept (relating to Bruno Liebich’s term ‘Einheimische Grammatik’) is taken in its widest sense here to account for a continua of forms and ways of language-oriented research, various degrees of systematic reflection on language structure and use, the culture-specific ingredients of different grammatical «schools», linguistic and folk-linguistic speculation, language awareness, linguistic ideologies and similar endeavours. Some assumptions underlying the central hypotheses of this book are: – Linguistics, every grammatical description, has a strong cultural binding. – It is worthwhile to describe the culturally bound differences in a systematic fashion. – There are indigenous grammars and grammarians of entirely different denominations than what Western linguists are accustomed to dealing with. – A heuristic continua of indigenous grammar can be set up which is worth being studied by linguists in a cross-cultural comparative fashion.