A Forensic Linguistic Analysis of Crime Language Used in the Headlines of the Newspaper “The News International”

Abstract

This paper considers forensic linguistics as a tool to study the language of crime news used in criminal reports. The objective of the study is to understand the intentions of crime news reporters behind their selected words for crime news reports. It highlights that it is very necessary to comprehend the vocabulary used in crime news articles. The research is based on the descriptive-qualitative method, which covers a pragmatic approach to analysing discourse. Both "Relevance theory" and content analysis are used as a theoretical framework to study ten headlines taken from the "The News International" newspaper. As a result of the analysis, it is observed that the media has the power to shape public opinion since the language used in crime news articles can affect readers both positively and negatively. The study also reveals that the words handed down in these top ten news stories had an adverse impact on readers due to the use of negative vocabulary.