FORENSIC LINGUISTICS AS A CATALYST FOR CRIME DETECTION AMONG NIGERIAN YOUTHS: A STUDY OF SELECTED POLICE INVESTIGATIONS AND COURT PROCEEDINGS

Abstract

The rate of criminal activities among the youths is increasing everyday especially through thebirth of new linguistic knowledge in human endeavours. These crimes are facilitated by communication, particularly, linguistic communication. The aim of this study is to ascertain the role of forensic linguistics in the detection of crimes among the youths. The study adopts descriptive/discursive design while the corpus consists of a transmitted video clip of suspects confessional statements and three contemporary criminal cases investigated and published in online newspapers. The crime cases being studied include prevalent criminal cases among the young people such as cultism, kidnapping, robbery, rape, murder and fraud related issues. The analysis focuses on the lexical, syntactic and semantic features. The findings of this study show similar pronunciation, voice identification, accents of the accused persons, theiruse of personal pronouns/possessive determiner, suspicious/repeated lexicon, active sentences and thematic roles as significant forensic features. It concludes that forensic linguistics can be used as a resource to assist the law enforcement agents and the judges of high courts in investigations and interpretations of crime-related expressions. Thus, it is recommended that forensic linguistic approach should be featured in seminars, workshops, and articles on crime related issues, especially the ones that involve the youths.