“Go Ahead”: interpretation of creolized texts in forensic expertise

Abstract

The article investigates an urgent problem of interpretation of such object of forensic expertise as a creolized text, which combines verbal and non-verbal elements. In contemporary court practice, linguistic expertise of such test is quite common, however, there are contradictions in the use of methods for the analysis of provocative texts combining different elements. These unsolved problems are dealt with in this article; the author proposes a complex methodology for text decoding and interpretation that includes three important stages: description of a text; discovery of “the meaningful” elements; identification of the coding system. On the first stage it is important to establish the object of research, on the second stage we need to single out all the meaningful signs disregard of their functions, scope and place in the text, on the third stage we should work out a system that would explain the meanings of the signs and emphasize significant elements in their meanings. Each stage has its own tools: genre analysis, discursive analysis, semantic analysis, etc. The author suggests including the stage of verification of the results of creolized text analysis and describes the experience of the use of psycholinguistic experiment at this stage. The main principles that determine the efficiency of this methodology are integrity and discursivity: the use of separate elements of this interpretation model will not give reliable results, as well it is impossible to analyze separate elements of the text or the text itself disregard of discourse it belongs to. The article provides an example of creolized provocative text interpretation based on the graffiti by Umka (a member of a nationalistic community SAWB).