Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have implemented different measures to control the spread of the disease. Policies like lockdowns can negatively impact citizens’ wellbeing (e.g. Rossi et al. 2020), including professionals working with sensitive data and in legal settings (e.g. Barros et al. 2020). For the first time, this article addresses how this general crisis may have affected forensic linguistics caseworkers’ practices and wellbeing. In November 2020, a fixed-response questionnaire was circulated among the forensic linguistics online community. Results show that the most consequential changes in the caseworkers’ professional practices brought about by the pandemic have to do with their working environment and schedule. Following the discussion of the results, some recommendations regarding caseworkers’ self-care are outlined and discussed. Given the constant changes in policies and the evolution of the pandemic, further surveys and a general discussion concerning practitioners’ wellbeing would benefit this professional community.
As an occupational stressor, working with disturbing material can lead to burnout and vicarious trauma. A profession where exposure to potentially disturbing data tends to be common is that of the forensic linguist, both as an academic researcher and an expert witness in investigative and court settings. Yet, very little is known about the nature of occupational stress in forensic linguistic practice or the coping strategies forensic linguists employ. We address this knowledge gap by drawing on the intersubjective perspective of twelve practitioners, who were interviewed about aspects of their work. We apply thematic analysis to the data to find out what kinds of situations potentially detrimental to psychological wellbeing they encounter in their everyday practice, and how they respond to those situations. We find that, while the practitioners acknowledge the disturbing nature of case data, they are rarely affected by it, at least ostensibly so. This could be due to a number of coping strategies they mention, such as desensitisation; talking to others; putting a distance between themselves and the work; mentally preparing themselves for what they will be seeing, hearing or reading; and seeing their work as contributing positively to society.
Current approaches to the expansion of semantic lexicons for corpus annotation are somewhat ad hoc in nature and do not generally offer a systematic means of identifying areas for development within one’s lexicon. The present paper sets forward a domain based approach to semantic lexicon expansion, targeting UCREL’s Semantic Analysis System (USAS). First, an updated version of the lexicon is compared to representative corpora to ascertain areas of underrepresentation in a novel method which we call K-FLUX analysis. Second, an example set of underrepresented types are targeted for development using domain specific corpora. Collectively, the results show that some corpora are more successful than others in supplementing the existing USAS lexicon. The paper discusses the various factors that should be borne in mind when utilising the proposed method before concluding with how findings might inform future developments of the lexicon, and crucially, the semantic system on which it is based.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.