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Word formation CEFR C1 Topic: Forensic linguistics – analysing language to solve legal mysteries

Reading Between the Lines: Forensic Linguistics

What this tests: word building — prefixes, suffixes, negative forms and changing a word's part of speech.

Instructions

For questions 1–8, use the word in capitals at the end of each line to form a word that fits the gap in the same line.

Forensic linguistics is the branch of applied linguistics that uses a systematic ANALYSE of texts to help identify the authors of ransom notes, threatening letters, and disputed confessions.

By comparing vocabulary, punctuation, and syntactic quirks, specialists can sometimes attribute an anonymous document to its true author with CONSIDER confidence.

Such attributions, however, rest on evidence that can occasionally prove surprisingly RELY, since a writer's style may be imitated or deliberately disguised.

Investigators must therefore remain wary of a INTERPRET of ambiguous phrasing that could mislead a jury,

and must detect every SUBTLE of style that a layperson would overlook.

When a case reaches court, the expert's findings must be presented CONVINCE enough to satisfy a judge that

the linguistic evidence is ADMIT.

Even so, the discipline continues to provoke several AGREE among specialists about how much weight courts should assign to such findings, and certain celebrated verdicts remain hotly debated decades later.

This meticulous, evidence-based approach has already helped overturn several wrongful convictions around the world.

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🎬 Video walkthrough

This exercise read aloud, sentence by sentence: a pause to answer each question, the hint after the pause, then the answer and why. It gives the answers — try the exercise first.

9 min. All video walkthroughs