Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.394

EDITOR: John Douthwaite
EDITOR: Ulrike Tabbert
TITLE: The Linguistics of Crime
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Olamide Eniola

SUMMARY
The Linguistics of Crime is a collection of fifteen chapters edited by John Douthwaite and Ulrike Tabbert, which explore how language works in crime texts. Right at the introduction by the editors, it becomes clear that the volume illuminates how crime and the perception of crime are represented across texts, text types, text genres, cultures, and legal systems. Even though the volume does not study real crime and criminals, its focus on linguistic analysis allows each of the contributors to explore the plethora of texts – fiction novels, poetry, offenders' accounts of wrongdoings, legal documents, and news – available about crime and to make assertions about how language constructs the crime discourse.
The cognitive linguistic construction and analysis of Otherness open the discussions in this volume. Central to this opening discussion are the questions: how do we conceptualize the relationship between self and the other, and on what basis is Otherness created? Starting with the discussion of the Other, Kovecses and Douthwaite show that metonymic thinking and metaphoric labeling influence how humans categorize 'we-other'. We stereotype, defamiliarize, and demonize the Other through these cognitive activities. Following these observations, the authors argued that crime, criminality, labeling, and negative evaluation are instantiations of Otherness. In their examination of two literary works – Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy and Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner – and a film – Nil by Mouth - Kovecses and Douthwaite suggest that crime is not only an expression of Otherness but also can be an oppositional, ideological, social, and class conflict between the haves and the have nots and the superiors and the inferiors.
In Chapter 3, Monika Fludernik continues discussing metaphors, but this time within the context of human experience of confinement. While seeking to know how prisons are imagined metaphorically, what attribute certain situations have that make them prison-like, and what features of incarceration get foregrounded, Fludernik examines carceral metaphors beyond prisons and inmates to include restrictions people experience in various socio-political and ideological contexts. Running a search through the Literature Online (LION) database, Fludernik shows the prevalence of prison metaphors in abstract concepts (like religion), ideas (mind), emotions (jealousy), and social rules. Drawing heavily on PRISON IS FILTH/SEWER and PRISON AS WILDERNESS/JUNGLE tropes, the author argues that prison metaphors focus on inmates and their immorality, thus justifying prison as a place of misery and suffering for incarcerated criminals while deflecting attention from the prison and legal system.
How the Golden Age produces two different literary cultures in Britain and the United States starts John Douthwaite's discussion of ideology in crime fiction in Chapter 4. The author observes that while the British fiction writing culture remains conservative by not debating social issues, the literary culture in the United States is more socio-politically oriented, constantly criticizing the system averse to justice. Beyond its entertainment value, Douthwaite conceives crime fiction, drawing on crime novels and television series by Agatha Christies and Caroline Graham, as a site of ideological and discursive struggle. One other major concern in the chapter is how Graham positions readers in crime fiction, especially how her character portrayal both conveys her ideology and, at the same time, invites readers to share the same ideology. The chapter concludes by analyzing the stylistic devices, namely, speech and thought presentation, by which Graham influences readers' perception and Narrative Report of Speech Act and Free Direct Thought to make them directly experience the intensity of characters' thoughts and emotions.
In Chapter 5, where discussions about crime and victimhood open, Christiana Gregoriou explores the crime of child trafficking by showing what victims of the crime experience. Through a critical and stylistic analysis of Minette Walter's The Cellar, Gregoriou shows how literary texts create awareness about human trafficking through the experience of an eight-year-old Muna. Even though Walter depicts (Muna's) trafficking alongside her traffickers, the Sangolis, as a problem imported into the UK by foreigners, Gregoriou's analysis suggests that such representation, where transnational trafficking is othered, fails to account for global inequality and domestic structural causes of the crime. Furthermore, the author identifies Muna's focalized third-person narration of speech presentation (which shows Muna's lack of control over the abusive way others speak about/to her), naming strategies (her captors use in describing her), her animalistic metaphors (to describe her captors), transitivity and (deontic) modality as linguistic devices which give readers a sense of Muna's imprisonment and limiting living conditions as a 'female, non-white, young, sexualised' (102) victim. Yet within such a narrative of modern-day slavery, Muna breaks free of her limiting conditions to retaliate against her captors. Such vindictive action of a supposed victim, Gregoriou argues, problematizes the distinction between 'victim' and 'abuser' in narratives about trafficking.
The conversation about the victim of crime wraps up in Chapter 6 as Mahmood Kadir Ibrahim and Urlike Tabbert analyze the linguistic construction of political crimes and victims in the Kurdish-Iraqi war. The peculiarity of the Kurdish-Iraqi war analyzed in this chapter is that when no victim is specified, the offender is unnamed. Drawing an extract from Sherko Bekas' poem, The Small Mirrors, Ibrahim and Tabbert argue that 'due to a binary opposition between victims and perpetrators' (109), the offenders are present even when not explicitly mentioned in the poem analyzed. The authors employ critical stylistics (Jeffries, 2010) to identify ideological meaning in Beka's poems and to explore the construction of victims. They observe that, through linguistic prioritizing – passive transformation – Bekas foregrounds the recipients of atrocities, namely the victims, in the subject position and leaves the reader to fill in the missing link of the unnamed offender. While noting that the political victimization under consideration involves killing people and nature, Ibrahim and Tabbert argue for the place of Bekas' poem in resisting the hegemonic discourse of political crime.
How translation and adaptation have become ways of increasing accessibility and recreating crime fiction, respectively, are the thematic preoccupations in Chapters 7 and 8. In his discussion of 'Stylistic Aspects of Detective Fiction in Translation,' Simon Zupan creates awareness about the stylistic, cultural, and literary differences between two languages in translation. In answering the question, 'How does style travel between languages, cultures, and literary systems?' especially in detective fiction, Zupan delves into analyzing what is lost and gained during the process of translation, how the stylistic norms and constraints of the target language affect those of the source text and how stylistic translation shifts affect the reception of detective fiction. The chapter discusses Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue and two of its translations in Slovenian. Even though translational stylistics places more importance on the source text and not on the translator's personal style, Zupan observes several stylistic shifts – some of which include a change in modality, transitivity pattern, and register – in Slovenian translations of Poe's short story, most of which are the translators' intervention. These shifts, Zupan argues, are 'mandated by the language-systemic difference between English and Slovenian' (130). The chapter demonstrates the applicability of translational stylistics for crime fiction translation and its usefulness for literary translators.
In Chapter 8, Anne Furlong explores transnational adaptions of Sherlock Holmes' stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. In illuminating crime text adaptions, Furlong goes beyond Zupan to show that a translated text is an adaptation of the source text, allowing adaptors to augment and alter contexts of source works and their audience to develop cognitive readings beyond source works. Contrary to the prevalence of fidelity in adaptation studies, Furlong opines that the 'adaptor has no duty to 'respect' the sources, except as this serves their communicative purpose' (151). To this end, the author uses relevance theory, which guides audiences to the optimal assumptions in utterance as either intended or unintended by the communicator, to show that 'adaptations constitute an independent and original communicative act neither restricted to nor constrained by the intended interpretation of the earlier text' (156); adaptation is unlike translation where a translator is restricted by and speaks for the author. To argue for the independence of adaptation, Furlong discusses Maslennikov's 1981 Russian-language film of The Hound of the Baskervilles and the HBO-Asia series Miss Sherlock to show various transmediated, historical, and cultural domestications of Sherlock Holmes in Russian and Japanese narratives. The author observes that the Russian and Japanese adaptations of Sherlock Holmes have succeeded because adaptors modify and revise source texts for their own communicative purposes, taking their own audiences into consideration' (171).
Making claims to victimhood is a socially negotiated process, yet one wonders what happens when the claim to victimhood is not approved by the public. In Chapter 9, M'Balia Thomas investigates the role of broadcast content and narrative structure on public perception of and response to a claim of victimization. Relying on a television interview, The Bed Intruder, Thomas explicates victim testimonials by siblings, Antoine and Kelly Dodson, whose claim to rape by a bed intruder becomes parodied, thus excluding the Dodsons from the public compassion, respect, and social concern due to victims. The central question of the chapter is: how is the claim to victimhood mediated, and how does this mediation shape public perception? Drawing on Text World Theory (Gavins 2007; Werth 1999), by which the context of discourse production and reception reveals textual and conceptual structures, Thomas analyses the textual cues in live broadcast reporting and voice-over narration, which endorse or depart from the victims' narrative. The theory reveals how broadcast discourse invites or closes off narrative roles for viewers. In a situation where narrative voice-overs and structures depart from public responses to and victims' claims to victimization in The Bed Intruder, the author argues that such revoicing, retelling, and rekeying, which is at temporal, locative, and epistemic distance to the discourse world of participants, raise ethical concerns.
In Chapter 10, Simon Statham analyses a scene from David Chase's crime drama, The Sopranos, to exemplify how dramatic dialogue works with audiovisual techniques (like camera shot, gaze, and action) in crime telecinematic discourse. Adopting a multimodal stylistic analysis, Grice's maxims of relation and quantity, and Goffman's participation framework, the chapter weaves together a blend of analysis of camera shots, gaze and action of characters, and the conversational intentions of characters engaged in crime talk. As Statham's analysis shows, characters engaged in crime opt out of the cooperative principle by refusing to acknowledge incriminating conversational topics and to provide confirmation, acknowledgment, or additional information when quizzed by the authorities. In a multimodal stylistic analysis, the author shows that the meaning of dialogue is enhanced when the attention is not only on the characters' dialogue but also on their gestures and actions. Furthermore, Statham uses multimodal stylistic analysis to demonstrate how betrayal is exposed in a crime talk.
Because Rio funk, especially the proibidao genre, mostly eulogizes armed groups in its lyrics while also challenging the state's authority in Brazil, it is often criminalized, stigmatized, and perceived as anti-social by the authorities. Therefore, Andrea Mayr, in Chapter 11, draws on Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Grammar, and Appraisal Theory to analyze some funk lyrics, arguing that 'funk proibidao … addresses and recontextualises the imbrications of state and criminal violence' (214), which the media and public discourse are often silent about. Through discourse analysis, ethnography, and informal interviews, Mayr argues that funk proibidao is a tool that the underprivileged youth produce and perform to articulate their favela's life identity and experience of marginalization. The author shows how, as a counter-hegemonic discourse, the criminalized music genre functions as a site for the underprivileged youth both to contest the dominant socio-cultural order that excludes them and to create a space for themselves.
In Chapter 12, Ulrike Tabbert, exploring the intersection of crime, linguistics, and psychology, shows the linguistic patterns that characterize the mind style of a person with schizophrenia. In other words, through a stylistic analysis, Tabbert shows how the personal and cognitive worldview of schizophrenia manifests in writings. Even though Fowler (1977) coins' mind style' to focus on fictional characters, Tabbert's use of it in analyzing a real John Doe's writing reveals how applicable the concept is to authentic texts and in explaining 'how a person with mental disturbance perceives his criminal act' (256) however petty or serious. Tabbert's analysis shows that John Doe's mind style is characterized by a wrong interpretation of others' behavior based on his mind deficit. Linguistically, his writing contains an excessive use of first-person pronouns arising from over self-awareness and self-focus, a preference for mental processes above material processes, a preference for epistemic modality, which allows him to express his motives for the crime, and extensive use of negation. As Tabbert argues, John Doe fails to process information correctly due to his deficits in social encounters. Owing to his preference for mental processes, John Doe's experience of body feelings transcends other people's body experience. Consequently, Tabbert's analysis of metaphorical choices shows that John Doe prefers source domains that are related to the human body and its sensory abilities, thus making him relate everything to his body: 'MENTAL PERCEPTION/COGNITION IS BODILY EXPERIENCE' (273).
The important role metaphor plays in the professional use of legal language is the focus of Douglas Mark and Marco Canepa in Chapter 13. The authors aim to argue for the centrality of metaphor in the composition of, in talking about, in accepting, and in modifying concepts in legal discourse. The discussions distinguish between a view of law as an all-inclusive code to be applied – an Aristotelian application of perfect logic – and one which privileges interpretation and conviction through verbal processes – a Giovani Tarello's stance. However, because legal speech has several meanings requiring interpretation, metaphors are deployed in such speech as rhetorical/persuasive figures rather than tools for logical reasoning. As metaphors must be made and interpreted, their use in legal discourse suggests that legal proceedings are subjective. Using data from volumes of the Cambridge Law Journal (CLJ) from 2016 to 2019, the authors identify instances of metaphorical language and their functional role in the structure of legal argumentation. Mark and Canepa show how metaphors form deontological propositions which advance certain positionality in legal discussions. Overall, the authors use the chapter to explain the role metaphors play in helping us understand complicated legal matters.
What happens when financial regulators and investigators become guilty of the crime they are tasked to adjudicate? In Chapter 14, Ilse Ras examines how British newspapers report regulators and investigators on corporate fraud. Focusing on the news reports between 2004 and 2014, Ras shows how two leading regulatory bodies tasked with regulating and investigating crime in financial markets, the UK-based Financial Services Authority and the US-based Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), are portrayed in the news. Using a mix of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and corpus study (of corporate fraud news), the author assesses the portrayal of the agencies and the word choices in referring to them to show whether news reports enhance or negate the legitimacy of the agencies in regulating financial institutions in the UK and the US. Analysis shows that the regulators are personified, metaphorized as animals (watchdogs), and generally constructed as functional agents of Material Action Intentional (MAI) where they launch investigations, authorize banks, and bring lawsuits. Given the linguistic agency role of the regulators, Ras shows that 'banks' and 'companies' are constant collocates of 'regulators' and that they are the targets (the Goals) of the regulatory processes. Because news reports sometimes cast judgments on issues under focus (see Chapter 9), the author argues that the prevalence of deontic modals in reporting the agencies suggests that the regulators are not implementing the law as they should; thus, leading banks and companies to survive through wrongdoing. The chapter lives up to its title by diffusing the blame for citizens' exploitation by banks and companies on the financial regulators.
Finally, John Douthwaite rounds up the conversation by examining ideology in critical crime fiction in Chapter 15. Using the television series Inspector George Gently, Douthwaite exemplifies critical crime fiction via its ideological workings and the linguistic techniques it uses in positioning readers/viewers.

EVALUATION
As stated by the editors of this volume, 'the application of linguistic analysis to a range of crime-related text types…is extremely rare in crime studies' (3). Despite filling that gap through (critical) stylistics, critical discourse analysis, ethnography, and metaphorical analysis, among others, this volume still shows us how linguistics intersects with literature, sociology, forensic psychology, law, rhetoric, and finances. As a result, I consider how the volume integrates these various methods, theories, and fields in analyzing crime texts as its major achievement. Relatedly, the volume features various genres of texts. From crime fiction, crime talk, song lyrics, news broadcast, to newspaper reports, to mention a few, these texts not only imitate authentic crime situations but also make readers see how various text genres encode crime. Contributors to this volume can be categorized into public prosecutors and professors of Linguistics/English Language. This varied background of authors breathes freshness into scholarship in linguistics. While thirteen chapters treat crime within the broader context of various linguistic theories, Chapters 12 and 13 tilt toward studying crime within psychology and legal discourse. One can argue that the volume shows that scholarship in linguistics, when immersed in researching vices confronting human society, can be multidisciplinary and can attract perspectives from fields least imagined.
While contributions of the volume are numerous, it is worth pointing to a few areas where a little attention could increase the work's appeal. One expects a book on crime to feature more than the written mode of communication in depicting the various crimes discussed. Apart from the cover page and a few figures, readers encounter no multimodal means of communication while reading the book. This is even more telling for those chapters that are multimodal (Chapter 10) and ethnographic (11) in orientation. I believe using pictures from The Sopranos and funk ethnography would complement discussions in those chapters. Similarly, I consider discussions about stylistic shifts in Chapter 7, especially between pp. 124-145, a total of 21 pages, dense. Because of the importance of that section to this volume, one expects to see the section split into manageable sections, which would make reading and comprehension easier.
Overall, the quality of research in this volume outweighs its shortcomings. Those interested in crime, linguistics (especially stylistics, CDA, and linguistic anthropology), and translation studies will find it useful. Despite its focus on crime, the volume is theoretically grounded and ethically compliant. Given the plethora of studies on crime in criminology, sociology, and economics, this volume shows what is missing when perspectives from linguistics are not yet considered in studying crime. Without studying real crime and criminals, this volume aptly shows that 'there exists an immense parallel world of discourse on crime' (2) to be explored. As a linguistic anthropologist interested in the ethnography of news production and reception of terrorism, I find every discussion about crime relevant, as the volume offers insight into news (both broadcast and print) and other texts about crime.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Olamide Eniola is a PhD Candidate in Linguistic Anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests include language and discursive practices around news production and reception. He is currently on his fieldwork in Nigeria.