Justina Urbonaitė began with her engaging lecture, “Linguistics at the Crime Scene: How Words Become Evidence.” She opened with an interactive exercise: students were shown a CCTV clip of a robber and then a lineup of three people. Most students instinctively tried to identify the suspect, but none were correct. This highlighted linguistic manipulation, how small wording choices in police interrogations can create assumptions and increase the risk of wrongful convictions. Justina then explained forensic linguistics and the roles of forensic linguists. She briefly discussed authorship analysis, forensic phonetics, plagiarism detection, and linguistic profiling. Justina then presented the Unabomber case as a famous example and explained how a team of forensic linguists analysed his writing and identified unique word combinations, archaic terms, idioms, and unusual phrasing. Using unique phrasing and word patterns, linguists created a profile that in the end helped track down the criminal. The lecture then included a practical exercise, allowing students to step into the role of language detectives. Students examined two cases:
A missing person case, where linguistic cues helped uncover details.
A suspected suicide note, where wording analysis helped question its authenticity.
Justina concluded that language is not random, words can and do become evidence, and forensic linguistics is science, not magic.
The lecture then transitioned to Davide Castiglione, who explored “Painting with Words: What’s in a Description?” He discussed how creative writing can bring characters to life by using language analytically, capturing the physicality of experiences, and engaging the senses. Language acts as a symbolic system that can evoke sensory memories. Students then practiced descriptive writing with a “synaesthesia” exercise. He asked students to combine multiple senses and use precise adjectives before nouns, keeping descriptions under 30 words, and provided a vocabulary list of adjectives and nouns to assist them. Davide emphasized that literary characters often reveal physical, psychological, and behavioral traits, as well as the passage of time through contrasts between past and present, using examples from Kazuo Ishiguro’s “An Artist of the Floating World” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” to illustrate detailed character descriptions. He introduced the technique of describing from general to specific, starting with overall impressions, then detailing features such as body and face. In a second practical task, students were asked to describe someone they know in 40–50 words, incorporating body parts and physical traits, personality and behavior adjectives, a meaningful detail, an element of contrast, and zooming in and out from general to specific. Davide emphasized that contrast makes descriptions richer and that even subtle details, such as clothing, can convey personality and setting.
Prepared by Viktorija Timpaitė, English Philology, Year 4.
