The linguistics of crime provides an analysis of the relationship between language and crime from the prism of pragmatics, metaphor theory, critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, multimodality, intertextuality, stylistics, and corpus linguistics. Along the fifteen chapters, this volume ‘contrasts the linguistic representation of crime across a range of genres’ (i), both in fiction and in real life. The presence of contributors from different backgrounds makes this book suitable for researching the ideological representation of crime based on the intersection of disciplines and methodologies (i.e. criminology, sociology, forensic psychology, and criminology, law, and rhetoric). The remarkable aspect of this book lies in how it approaches it: analyzing the social criticism aspects in the discourse of crime and bringing linguistic studies beyond its common areas of research.
The volume opens with chapter 1, which serves as a comprehensive introduction to the topics of crime, social structure, values, and linguistic perspectives, as well as an overview of the whole piece of work. Following the analysis of the ‘Other’ from a metaphoric and metonymic perspective, chapter 2 concludes that this corresponds to an enemy as well as a primitive man/barbarian/wild animal. Chapter 3 attends to the importance of metaphors in communication—specifically carceral metaphors—and their connection to crime. Chapter 4 and chapter 15 approach crime texts as a source of struggle, examining them from conservative and critical approaches. Chapter 5 analyses the ‘linguistic tools’ and the social criticism of immigration as a relationship with organized criminal exploitation. Chapter 6 focuses on victims of crime using a selection of Iraqi poems that are dedicated to the victims of genocide, as chapter 7 utilizes a translation of crime fiction into Slovenian to draw attention to the way linguistic and social differences affect the decisions made by the translator. Chapter 8 observes the reinterpretation of texts and their outcomes as they progress into the next texts. Chapter 9 adds the topic of parody to the last two chapters’ conclusions. The author—amongst other approaches—pays attention to race within US society, to scrutinize what the ‘empathetic and ethical effects … between the broadcast's narrative telling … and the victim testimonial create for viewers’ (191). Chapter 10 displays the multimodal dimension of communication, as chapter 11 connects fictional and actual criminals by delving into the historical, political, social, and cultural context of criminal organizations from both groups. Chapter 12 is centered on criminal individuals, as it bridges the gap between psychology and psychiatry and, by contrast, provides a detailed analysis of the criminals’ recurring linguistic patterns. Chapter 13 focuses on the legal domain and studies the role played by metaphor in the legal sphere and, conversely, the following chapter uses real-world crime to observe how corporate crime works in our current society.
A wide range of potential readers, from non-experts to researchers seeking current insights, will find this volume appealing due to its formal features and engaging content. The multidisciplinarity of the chapters enhances the pedagogical potential of the book, making it equally appropriate for the consultation of specific chapters.
