Resumen de Analysing huge amounts of recorded oral language evidence
While consulting on dozens of criminal cases that involve tape recorded evidence, it has been my experience that the conventional focus of prosecutors is on what they consider to be the individual and isolated "smoking gun" statements Jound on the tapes. This article uses my analysis of the criminal case oJ a famous automobile manufacturing executive, John Z. DeLorean, to demonstrate that when large amounts of spoken language evidence are preserved on tape, it is critically important for linguists to start their analyses with the larger units of language; that is, to identify the speech events, schemas of the participants, their agendas as revealed by the topics they bring up, and their speech acts in order to contextualise and therefore better understand the smaller and decontextualised recorded language units where the alleged "smoking guns" normally exist in the syntax, lexicon, and sounds.
