a branch of applied linguistics that investigates issues of language in relation
to the law, drawing on resources from semantics, acoustic phonetics,
discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and other fields.
Issues of concern include forensic identification(speaker identification
in legal cases through handwriting analysis or speech analysis); inter-
pretationfor the police and courts; the semantics of legal terminology
(e.g. the legal meanings of murder, manslaughter, homicide); the discourse
of police interrogations and legal proceedings; accent discrimination;
and the problems faced by non-native speakers and members of minority
speech communities when dealing with the judicial system.form n
the means by which an element of language is expressed in speech or
writing. Forms can be shown by the standard writing system for a language
or by phonetic or phonemic symbols. For example, in English:
written form spoken form
house /haäs/
Often a distinction is made between the spoken or written form of a lin-
guistic unit and its meaning or function.
For example, in English the written form -sand the spoken forms /s/ and /z/
have a common function. They show the plural of nouns:
/kæts/ cats /d∞gz//dÑpgz/ dogs
formal assessment n
tests given under conditions that ensure the assessment of individual
performance in any given area
see also informal assessment
formal competence n
see competence, communicative competence
formal grammar n
an approach to grammatical analysis and description in which the aim is to
investigate grammatical structures as primitives to be explained in terms of
their contribution to the systematic nature of language.
formal operational stage n
see cognitive development
formal schema n
see content schema
form