Textual strategies of forensic psychiatrists. A corpus-based analysis of how the language of psychiatry is reconciled with the language of law in polish forensic psychiatric opinions

Abstract

The role of an expert forensic psychiatrist is likened with that of a translator: their task is to translate the language of medicine into the language of law. The aim of the article was to reconstruct the textual strategies adopted by forensic psychiatrists in terms of reconciling the discourses of law and medicine. The analysis covered 65 opinions/reports issued at a psychiatric reference centre in Poland. Thanks to the application of the innovative corpus linguistics methodology, the singularities of forensic psychiatric opinions as a genre have been captured and the degree of its conventionalisation has been assessed. The findings indicate that psychiatric opinions have not yet achieved the status of a homogenous genre, and the standardisation and formalisation processes have only reached the structural level. The expert psychiatrists constrained the presence of the author's voice and did not use the narrative form in their opinions. The analysis also captured the ethical challenges related to the dual role of forensic psychiatrists as medical doctors and representatives of the judicial system.