The 15th Biennial Conference of the International Association of Forensic Linguists will take place from the 13th – 15th September 2021 The Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics (AIFL) is hosting the major event online Over 100 experts from around the world will speak across the three-day conference, including 15 from the AIFL The Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics (AIFL) is getting ready to host the 15th Biennial Conference of the International Association of Forensic Linguists (IAFL).
The three-day event will run entirely online from Monday 13 September to Wednesday 15 September 2021. Over 100 experts will take part in total, with 15 from the AIFL including one of the world’s most experienced forensic linguistic practitioners Professor Tim Grant.
All presentations will be pre-recorded, with talks played out during the conference in parallel sessions and there will be opportunities for a live Q&A for each presenter.
Alongside this traditional schedule format, the presentations will be made available to watch after the conference to make sure participants from different time zones don’t miss out.
Professor Tim Grant, director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, said:
“We’re so pleased to be hosting the IAFL conference again. “We last hosted it in 2011 and looking through the programme it is clear to see both the expansion of interest in forensic linguistics across the last decade and the progress that has been made in the discipline. “It is going to be a really exciting event.” Dr Tahmineh Tayebi, a lecturer in forensic linguistics at the AIFL, said:
“This year’s IAFL Conference, hosted by AIFL, is a truly international event. “It is a meeting venue for researchers from literally every corner of the world to discuss some fascinating topics, ranging from analysis of police interviews and courtroom discourse to online crimes and cyberbullying. “With its diverse research topics, the many languages explored and the variety of analytical approaches, the conference is testament to the fact that forensic linguistics is indeed a very active and popular line of research that never ceases to inspire.” You can find out more about the event here.
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"It's the whole 'money doesn't make you happy' adage... two fifths of football players are bankrupt within 5 years of retirement, while a third divorce in the same period" Professor Andy Lymer, Aston University In this episode, Steve chats to Dr Tahmineh Tayebi and Professor Andy Lymer and the social media abuse and financial responsibility that comes with being a top footballer and athlete.
Dr Tahmineh Tayebi looks at the linguistics of social media abuse. She starts by understanding the fans' perspective. They've invested time, money and trust in clubs/players and feel entitled to opinions/criticism but the issue is the language used.
Explicit and hateful language often racist and/or violent is the easiest to cope with, as it can be banned. But there's lots of "clever" offensive language which breaks no laws and is difficult to spot but still hurtful.
Tahmineh discusses loose boundaries between freedom of expression and bullying. She also points to the recent social media boycott and the BT Hope United project.
Professor Andy Lymer looks at the issues faced by wealthy players. He cited interesting research showing 2/5 of football players are bankrupt within 5 years of retirement, while 1/3 divorce in the same period. Players have short careers and either need to earn enough to last them with good advice or need to do something else after playing.
However, Professor Lymer says many still quickly burn through their fortunes. He notes Britain is bad at educating people in dealing with money, especially in 'decumulation' e.g. making it last, planning savings for pensions and downsizing.
He points to various government-backed schemes/helplines which can help anyone. The big issue is top footballers attracting long queues of people wanting to advise their slice.
Getting the right, trustworthy advice is the problem. In football itself, big clubs are guiding young, vulnerable players as part of their development, and various players' organisations also help, such as a 24-hour helpline. But the stats show us it's not enough, and Andy calls for the sector to do more in education.
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Biography
Dr Tahmineh Tayebi is a Senior Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics. She also serves as the research coordinator and lead for the HALO (Harmful and Abusive Language Online) research cluster at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, where the focus is on examining the role of language in the composition and dissemination of hateful and dangerous ideologies online.
Tahmineh's research expertise lies in the area of online harm, particularly online offensive language, cyberbullying, online abuse and hate speech. She explores how language is used to inflict harm in digital spaces and examines the implications of such communication in legal and social contexts. She also has an interest in analysing the role of the offendee, or rather the victim, in cases of online abuse and bullying, and how this perspective can contribute to the development of preventative measures.
Tahmineh has conducted extensive research on impoliteness and aggression in both online and face-to-face interactions. Outputs of these projects have been published in some of the leading journals of the field.
1 in Every 9 Tweets That Women MPs Receive Is Abusive
John Smith Centre at the University of Glasgow
2025
Women especially experience harassment, abuse and intimidation via email and on social media. Previous analyses have argued that Twitter (now X) is a particularly toxic place for women where women MPs are more likely to be stereotyped and their role as politicians questioned. Our own research shows that, even though levels of outright violence and misogyny are low, there is a concerningly high level of rude and disrespectful language portraying women from both Labour and Conservatives as lacking the capabilities and integrity to be politicians.
While studies devoted to impoliteness have been increasing in number, only scant attention has been paid to how impoliteness can be viewed as a reaction against attributes or social actions that are deemed undesirable. The current study is concerned with the relationship between ‘impoliteness’ and the notion of ‘moral order’. More specifically, we examine the aggressive comments directed towards the official Facebook page of an Iranian actress, living in exile, after posting a nude photograph of herself. We consider the impolite language used in the comments under investigation to have been occasioned by an implicature, and subsequently argue that such an aggressive language originates from a set of similar assumptions and expectations which seem to be part of the moral order. As the study reveals, considerations of impoliteness are heavily dependent upon the development of communities whose members apparently share, and demand, common beliefs and similar social values.
Implying an impolite belief: A case of tikkeh in Persian
Intercultural Pragmatics
2018
The focus of this study is on a particular type of implied impoliteness in Persian commonly known as tikkeh. Given the lack of critical attention paid to the notion of implied impoliteness in the literature, the present study seeks to explore this issue further by addressing the following questions: (i) What is implied impoliteness? (ii) What are the properties which make it different from other types of conventionalized impoliteness? (iii) For whom is it offensive? And finally (iv) how does one evaluate an implied meaning as offensive? It will be argued that, in the right context, any utterance can potentially be evaluated as a tikkeh which can convey a negative impolite belief about the ratified and/or unratified hearer(s). In this respect, examples from both dyadic and polylogal interactions are provided. Along the way, the influence of relational histories as well as interpersonal expectations are also discussed.
Perception of (im)politeness and the underlying cultural conceptualisations
Pragmatics and Society
2017
The present study sets out to investigate the role of ‘culture’ as one of the many important factors that influence the evaluation of (im)politeness in Persian from a Cultural Linguistics perspective. The paper argues that Cultural Linguistics, and in particular the notion of cultural schema, has the potential to offer a robust analytical framework for the exploration of (im)polite use of language. We elaborate on this proposal by presenting examples of data from Persian in which speakers interpret impolite behaviour in light of a number of Persian cultural schemas. The study also offers a novel three-layered approach for the analysis of (im)politeness data that combines metadiscourse analysis with the ethnography of cultural conceptualisations, while highlighting the importance of the notion of ‘heterogeneous distribution’ of cultural conceptualisations, a pivotal theoretical concept in Cultural Linguistics which accounts for the variations in speakers’ evaluation of (im)politeness.
Perceptions of Impoliteness from a Cultural Linguistics Perspective
Advances in Cultural Linguistics
2017
This chapter explores the role of ‘culture’ in perceptions of impoliteness from a Cultural Linguistics perspective. Recent studies of impoliteness have identified a number of factors that influence speakers’ perception of (im)polite language use. The chapter argues that Cultural Linguistics has the potential to offer a robust analytical framework for the exploration of the cultural conceptualisations that are often associated with (im)polite use of language. The framework provides a set of analytical tools for bringing to the foreground features of human languages that are entrenched in cultural conceptualisations, including cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural metaphors. This chapter elaborates on this proposal by presenting examples of naturalistic discourse from Persian in which speakers interpret impolite behaviour in the light of a number of Persian cultural schemas. The study reported in this chapter also adopts a novel three-layered approach that combines (meta)discourse analysis with the ethnography of cultural conceptualisations for data analysis.
Why do people take offence? Exploring the underlying expectations
Journal of Pragmatics
2016
The principal motivation for this study is to (i) analyse the types of expectations underlying people's evaluation of an act or behaviour as offensive and (ii) explore the various social and cultural factors that inform these expectations. Drawing on a corpus of 150 diary report forms written by Persian-speaking informants, the study revealed seven different, yet interrelated, expectations the unrealisation of which had led to taking of offence. In order to identify how these expectations are shared across a speech community, from each category of expectations two examples were randomly given to 100 new participants. As the retrospective comments revealed, while the expectations identified do exist in the speech community under investigation, they are not equally shared across all members. The ongoing tension between heterogeneity and homogeneity of these expectations can be explained by referring to both cognitive and relational bases of expectations.
