Linguistic Evidence Research Articles

Dinî Dışlayıcılık Söylemi İnşa Eden Neo-Klasik Selefî Anlayışın Eleştirisi: Dilin Epistemik Değeri Hakkında Fahreddin Râzî’ye Yöneltilen Tenkitler Özelinde Bir Değerlendirme

Al-Rāzī stated that specific criteria should exist for interpreting religious texts, with one of the two in particular prioritizing the conflict of ʿaql [reason] and naql [revelation]. Accordingly, he developed the theory of the hypothetical nature of linguistic evidence. According to al-Rāzī’s theory, literary evidence have been exposed to possible errors from transferring al-nahw [lexicography, morphology, and grammar] rules to the present day; different linguistic possibilities such as figurative speech homonymy and transfer of meanings (naql al-lugha) are likely to have occurred in the process. Therefore, religious texts do not express certainty when qarīnas [contextual clues] are absent. Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, leading names in the neo-classical Salafī understanding, described the view that literal evidence does not express ʿilm [definitive knowledge] but rather expresses Ûann [speculative knowledge] as taghūt [an idol], criticizing it to have a marginalizing and exclusionary style. The present article will examine the discourse of religious exclusivism produced within the framework of the hypotheticality of language and will show that this discourse is caused by Ibn Taymiyya’s and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s words being misunderstood. This study will first explain what is meant by religious exclusion and provide the intellectual background of the theory of the hypotheticality of language. Next, it will cover Ibn Taymiyya’s and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s questioning of al-Rāzī’s religiosity, and finish with how the accusations against Rāzī had stemmed from a misunderstanding of his ideas.

Yak Domestication: A Review of Linguistic, Archaeological, and Genetic Evidence

Yak, a species of bovid uniquely adapted to high-altitude environments, plays a critical role in the life of the inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau and neighboring areas. There is currently no consensus on when these animals may have been domesticated. In this paper, we review the archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence relevant to this question, and suggest that the domestication took place following hybridization with taurine cattle from the end of the fourth millennium BCE. This study also shows that the original domesticators of yaks included not only the ancestors of the Tibetans, but also Rgyalrongic speaking people from Eastern Tibet.

A corpus-based analysis of trainee translators’ performance in medical translation

ABSTRACT Medical translation plays an increasingly important role in mediating communication between medical professionals and facilitating medical research and practice. A close observation of empirical linguistic data of collective translated medical texts contributes to evaluating translators’ professional performance in this specialized field. This article describes the application of corpus linguistics methods to analyse trainee translators’ patterned use of the target language in medical translation. Based on an intensive review of corpus-based translation research, a case study is conducted among 27 Chinese trainee translators undertaking a Chinese-to-English medical report translation task. The translated texts in English are compiled to construct a target corpus. Standardized terminologies, patterns of semantic meaning, and the trainee translators’ discursive preferences are investigated and characterized. The analyses show that linguistic evidence retrieved from learner corpora is of vital importance to evaluate trainee translators’ lexical choices and discursive preferences in their translation practice, thus contributes to enhancing their critical language awareness of the cultural dimension in medical translation. The research findings have implications in program development for specialized translator training, particularly how to integrate selective corpus data into the design of inductive, reflective translation tasks.

Score-based likelihood ratios for linguistic text evidence with a bag-of-words model

The likelihood ratio paradigm for quantifying the strength of evidence has been researched in many fields of forensic science. Within this paradigm, score-based approaches for estimating likelihood ratios are becoming more prevalent in the forensic science literature. In this study, a score-based approach for estimating likelihood ratios is implemented for linguistic text evidence. Text data are represented via a bag-of-words model with the Z-score normalised relative frequencies of selected most-frequent words (the number of the most-frequent words = N), and the Euclidean, Manhattan and Cosine distance measures are trialled as the score-generating functions for comparing paired text samples. The score-to-likelihood-ratio conversion model was built using a common source method, and the best fitting model was selected from the parametric models of the Normal, Log-normal, Gamma and Weibull distributions. With the Amazon Product Data Authorship Verification Corpus, two groups of documents (each group including documents of approximately 700, 1400 and 2100 words) were synthesised for each author, allowing 720 same-author comparisons and 517,680 different-author comparisons to test the validity of the system. A series of experiments was conducted using combinations of the following conditions: the three score functions, the different values of N for the feature vector and the different document lengths. The validity of the system was assessed using the log-likelihood-ratio cost (Cllr), and the strength of the derived likelihood ratios was charted in the form of Tippett plots. It was demonstrated that 1) the Cosine measure consistently outperforms the other measures—the best performance is achieved with N = 260, regardless of the document length (e.g., Cllr values of 0.70640, 0.45314 and 0.30692, respectively, for 700, 1400 and 2100 words)—and 2) the derived likelihood ratios are very well calibrated irrespective of the distance measures and document lengths. A follow-up experiment showed that the described score-based approach is relatively robust and stable for a limited quantity of background data. The derived likelihood ratios that were estimated separately to the three distance measures were logistic regression fused; and the fusion achieved a further improvement in performance—for example, a Cllr of 0.23494 for 2100 words. This study demonstrates the possibility of designing likelihood ratio–based systems that discriminate between same-author and different-author documents.

Ancestral Dravidian languages in Indus Civilization: ultraconserved Dravidian tooth-word reveals deep linguistic ancestry and supports genetics

Ever since the discovery of Indus valley civilization, scholars have debated the linguistic identities of its people. This study analyzes numerous archaeological, linguistic, archaeogenetic and historical evidences to claim that the words used for elephant (like, ‘pīri’, ‘pīru’) in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, the elephant-word used in the Hurrian part of an Amarna letter of ca. 1400 BC, and the ivory-word (‘pîruš’) recorded in certain sixth century BC Old Persian documents, were all originally borrowed from ‘pīlu’, a Proto-Dravidian elephant-word, which was prevalent in the Indus valley civilization, and was etymologically related to the Proto-Dravidian tooth-word ‘*pal’ and its alternate forms (‘*pīl’/‘*piḷ’/‘*pel’). This paper argues that there is sufficient morphophonemic evidence of an ancient Dravidian ‘*piḷ’/‘*pīl’-based root, which meant ‘splitting/crushing’, and was semantically related to the meanings ‘tooth/tusk’. This paper further observes that ‘pīlu’ is among the most ancient and common phytonyms of the toothbrush tree Salvadora persica, which is a characteristic flora of Indus valley, and whose roots and twigs have been widely used as toothbrush in IVC regions since antiquity. This study claims that this phytonym ‘pīlu’ had also originated from the same Proto-Dravidian tooth-word, and argues that since IVC people had named their toothbrush trees and tuskers (elephants) using a Proto-Dravidian tooth-word, and since these names were widely used across IVC regions, a significant population of Indus valley civilization must have used that Proto-Dravidian tooth-word in their daily communication. Since ‘tooth’ belongs to the core non-borrowable ultraconserved vocabulary of a speech community, its corollary is that a significant population of IVC spoke certain ancestral Dravidian languages. Important insights from recent archaeogenetic studies regarding possible migration of Proto-Dravidian speakers from Indus valley to South India also corroborate the findings of this paper.

The Odd Future Participle at Pol. Phil. XIII: Reassessing the Authenticity and Unity of Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians

Abstract The Letter to the Philippians is the sole surviving work of the early Christian bishop and martyr, Polycarp of Smyrna. Ever since the 17th century scholars have contested the authenticity and unity of the letter without reaching a settlement. However, new linguistic evidence allows for a reassessment of the controversy. The future participle πρεσβεύσοντα at Pol. Phil. XIII.1 is one of a mere four occurrences of FPs in the entire corpus of the Apostolic Fathers, and the use of the FP is exceedingly rare among low-register Judeo-Christian texts in general. The statistical analysis over a wide range of Ancient Greek literary texts conducted in this paper lends support to the conclusion that Pol. Phil. is a uniform text with a spurious interpolation in the form of the bulk of chapter XIII.

التأصيل للمصطلح والمفهوم النبوي "بيت المقدس": الحاجة لإعادة إحياء هذا المصطلح الإسلاميالتأصيل للمصطلح والمفهوم النبوي "بيت المقدس": الحاجة لإعادة إحياء هذا المصطلح الإسلامي

Selecting the terminology is as important as creating concepts which represent the first nucleus and cornerstone in building perspectives from which the process of change emerges. On the other hand, the negligence of this pivotal and essential aspect leads to deficiencies and disastrous effects on community awareness and its preparatory process for change. Consequently, it is of utmost importance in the stage of knowledge-based preparation for the liberation of Bayt al-Maqdis (Islamicjerusalem) from the current occupation, to ground and root the concept and the prophetic terminology “Bayt Al-Maqdis”. As well as clarifying what is meant by this concept and term as a first foundational intellectual step for the upcoming liberation plan for this blessed and Holy Land. Thus, the key objective of this article is namely to ground the term and prophetic concept of “Bayt al-Maqdis,” and to clarify the need to revive this Islamic terminology. To achieve this goal, this article is divided into two parts; the first part discusses the origin of the name “al-Quds” and what is meant by it and its geographical boundaries in our current time, followed by discussing the origin of the term “Bayt al-Maqdis,” and how a new prophetic concept and term “Bayt al-Maqdis” was established with its sacred religious boundaries. The article presents the linguistic evidence from Arabic lexicons for the designation of the names “al-Quds” and “Bayt al-Maqdis,” the English translation of Bayt al-Maqdis to Islamicjerusalem and its consequences, and the importance of distinguishing between “Bayt al-Maqdis” and “al-Bayt al-Muqaddas” and identifying the meaning of the names associated with the Al-Aqsa Mosque and its compound. As for the second part of the article, it presents the urgent need for liberating the terminology and restoring its Islamic historical and geographical identity, thorough reviving the prophetic terminology used by the Messenger of God (PBUH), and clarifying the reasons that make the term “Bayt al-Maqdis” one of the best, most comprehensive, deepest, broadest and strongest terms. As well as the need for Muslims to use it and disseminate it. The discussion is then concluded by highlighting examples of the institutionalisation of the revival of the prophetic term “Bayt al-Maqdis” that has been commenced by the Academy of Islamicjerusalem Studies since 1990 worldwide.

Modelling the Language of Cyber Scammers: A Forensic Linguistics Analysis of Malaysian Illegal Investment Scheme

Over the last few years, there are growing concerns over the astronomical increase of reported cases of illegal internet investment schemes in Malaysia. Although the Central Bank of Malaysia (CBM) regulates and supervises financial institutions in order to combat illegal investment scheme through Financial Services Act 2013 (FSA 2013) and Islamic Financial Services Act 2013 (IFSA 2013), they do not protect the consumers should they choose to deal with the illegal financial service providers. The large financial losses have a negative impact fiscally on investors’ socioeconomic. Hence, this study is proposed to analyse Malaysian illegal internet investment scammers’ language properties to provide cyber defense for the public. Using Zhang and Wildermuth’s (2009) content analysis process, this study intends to examine the linguistic strategies used by scammers in their websites to deceive their targets. This study will focus on several websites identified by CBM as the primary data source. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with personnel from relevant government agencies. For triangulation purposes, individuals who have experienced investing and willing to share their experiences and data will be interviewed. All data will be coded and categorised, and emergent themes will be presented to answer research questions. With great hope, this study’s results will help provide comprehensive public education about these scams’ linguistics strategies as a strong defense against them. The results may also help the authorities develop better crime prevention methods and contribute to the criminal justice system in presenting more significant linguistic evidence in the court of law.

Multilingualism in eastern Indonesia: linguistic evidence of a shift from symmetric to asymmetric multilingualism

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions:The Alorese in eastern Indonesia are an Austronesian community who have inhabited two Papuan-speaking islands for approximately 600 years. Their language presents a paradox: contact with the neighbouring Papuan languages has led to both complexification and simplification. This article argues that these opposite outcomes of contact result from two distinct scenarios, and formulates a hypothesis about a shift in multilingual patterns in Alorese history.Design/Methodology/Approach:To formulate a hypothesis about the discontinuity of multilingual patterns, this article first sketches the past and present multilingual patterns of the Alorese by modelling language contact outcomes in terms of bilingual optimisation strategies. This is followed by a comparison of the two scenarios to pinpoint similarities and differences.Data and Analysis:Previous research shows that two types of contact phenomena are attested in Alorese: (a) complexification arising from grammatical borrowings from Papuan languages, and (b) morphological simplification. The first change is associated with prolonged child bilingualism and is the result of Papuan-oriented bilingual strategies, while the latter change is associated with adult second language (L2) learning and is the result of universal communicative strategies.Findings/ConclusionsComplexification and simplification are the results of two different layers of contact. Alorese was first used in small-scale bilingual communities, with widespread symmetric multilingualism. Later, multilingualism became more asymmetric, and the language started to undergo a simplification process due to the considerable number of L2 speakers.Originality:This article is innovative in providing a clear case study showing discontinuity of multilingual patterns, supported by linguistic and non-linguistic evidence.Significance/Implications:This article provides a plausible explanation for the apparent paradox found in Alorese, by showing that different outcomes of contact in the same language are due to different patterns of acquisition and socialisation. This discontinuity should be taken into account by models of language contact.

Relating linguistic reconstructions of plant names in Berber to the archaeobotany of North Africa

The archaeobotany, and in particular the chronology of the introduction and spread of agriculture in North Africa is slowly become better known. Nonetheless, there are many controversies, in particular the extent to which finds of cultivated crops are imports as opposed to indicative of true agriculture. It would therefore be helpful to establish the extent to which the evidence from linguistics reflects the archaeobotany of the region. The principle language of North Africa today is Arabic, interleaved with Berber, especially in Morocco and Algeria. This is obviously a recent phenomenon, and present-day languages are palimpsests, with traces of earlier languages such as Phoenician and Latin marking the introduction of new crops and agricultural techniques. Berber poses a particular problem, as despite its broad geographical range, the languages are all extremely close to one another, suggesting a recent spread, and thus the presence of numerous substrate languages which have now disappeared.The paper reviews the linguistic evidence for the main crops grown in North Africa during the period since the introduction of agriculture and the potential link with the archaeobotany of the region. Terms for the following crops appear to be reconstructible to proto-Berber;Cerealsbarley, wheat, millet, cereal (general term)Pulsesfava bean, lentil, LathyrusVegetablesonion, carrotFruitsdate, grape, olive, figThe paper considers the construction of the North African cultigen repertoire from the viewpoint of borrowings from Punic, Latin, Ancient Egyptian, West African languages and Arabic.

Northern and Southern Munya Dialects: Towards a Historical Perspective*

AbstractMunya, a Tibeto‐Burman language spoken in western Sichuan Province in China, is believed to have two dialects, an undescribed eastern dialect and a relatively better‐known western dialect. Based on previous studies and data gathered from fieldwork, I found that the western dialect can be further divided into a northern and a southern dialect. This study will present linguistic evidence for such a dialectal distinction and will discuss some diachronic changes that have created it. The dialects have a different phonological inventory and lexical differences. Grammatically, the two dialects differ in directional prefixes, formation of certain types of negation and questions, and the system of copula verbs of existence.

Bronze Age Globalisation and Eurasian Impacts on Later J\u014dmon Social Change

From northern China, millet agriculture spread to Korea and the Maritime Russian Far East by 3500–2700 BC. While the expansion of agricultural societies across the Sea of Japan did not occur until around 900 BC, the intervening period saw major transformations in the Japanese archipelago. The cultural florescence of Middle Jōmon central Honshu underwent a collapse and reorganisation into more decentralised settlements. Mobility increased as Late Jōmon influences spread from eastern into western Japan, and populations expanded to offshore islands such as Okinawa and the Kurils. In Kyushu and other parts of western Japan, the eastern Jōmon expansion was associated with the cultivation of adzuki and soybeans but, contrary to earlier assessments, there is no evidence for the introduction of cereal crops at this time. Here, we analyse archaeological and historical linguistic evidence of connections between the Eurasian mainland and the Japanese Islands c. 3500 to 900 BC. A re-evaluation of archaeological material discussed since the 1920s concludes that the transformations in Jōmon society during this period were at least in part a response to contacts with Eurasian Bronze Age cultures. Evidence for linguistic contact between Koreanic and the Ainuic languages which are presumed to have been spoken by Jōmon populations is also consistent with new Bronze Age mobilities. Although prehistoric Japan was one of the most isolated regions of Eurasia, we conclude that the historical evolution of societies in the Japanese archipelago after the third millennium BC was linked with processes of Bronze Age globalisation.

‘Qu'il est question d'une langue sauvage’: Phrasebooks for European Travellers in Eighteenth‐Century North America

AbstractThis article explores the vocabularies of Amerindian languages published as part of the travel accounts written by explorers, traders and colonial policymakers in North America over the eighteenth century. Starting with the renowned Voyages by the Baron de Lahontan, the analysis takes as its endpoint the journals of the famous expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The aim of this study is to foreground what these lexicographic compilations reveal about European encounters with societies categorised as radically different from – and less civilised than – the traveller's own: an ‘otherness’ sometimes exploited as a mirror and term of comparison that challenged the observer's ethnocentrism. Drawing on existing scholarship about the cultural history of Euro‐American encounters in the modern age, this study puts forward an original analysis of the temporal conceptualisations underpinning vocabularies of ‘savage languages’, in terms of both historical diachronicity and time as a culturally constructed frame of human experience.This focus on the lists of words and phrases included in travel accounts, journals and relations makes it possible to question the relationship between the recording of linguistic evidence and travel narratives, and explore the complex negotiations between empirical observation and pre‐existing cultural categories and stereotypes. A close reading of these often‐neglected primary sources helps us to identify recurrent conceptual tropes and assign a central role to the historicisation of the Amerindian within wider processes of cultural construction of a global Europeanness.

Xuan Zang’s Five Transliterations Revisited: A Corpus Linguistic Study of Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra

This paper examines the early translation theory of the Five Transliterations, which has been considered to be proposed by Xuan Zang back to 1300 years before, through corpus linguistic methods. The statistics based on our Sanskrit-Chinese Parallel corpus of Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra reveals that there exists very weak linguistic evidence that Xuan Zang proposed such a translation theory. The tension between historically recorded translation theories and practice is also discussed based on our findings. It is recommended that a corpus linguistic study may play a significant role in analyzing historical translation documents.

Genetic landscape of Gullah African Americans.

ObjectivesGullah African Americans are descendants of formerly enslaved Africans living in the Sea Islands along the coast of the southeastern U.S., from North Carolina to Florida. Their relatively high numbers and geographic isolation were conducive to the development and preservation of a unique culture that retains deep African features. Although historical evidence supports a West‐Central African ancestry for the Gullah, linguistic and cultural evidence of a connection to Sierra Leone has led to the suggestion of this country/region as their ancestral home. This study sought to elucidate the genetic structure and ancestry of the Gullah.Materials and MethodsWe leveraged whole‐genome genotype data from Gullah, African Americans from Jackson, Mississippi, African populations from Sierra Leone, and population reference panels from Africa and Europe to infer population structure, ancestry proportions, and global estimates of admixture.ResultsRelative to non‐Gullah African Americans from the Southeast US, the Gullah exhibited higher mean African ancestry, lower European admixture, a similarly small Native American contribution, and increased male‐biased European admixture. A slightly tighter bottleneck in the Gullah 13 generations ago suggests a largely shared demographic history with non‐Gullah African Americans. Despite a slightly higher relatedness to populations from Sierra Leone, our data demonstrate that the Gullah are genetically related to many West African populations.DiscussionThis study confirms that subtle differences in African American population structure exist at finer regional levels. Such observations can help to inform medical genetics research in African Americans, and guide the interpretation of genetic data used by African Americans seeking to explore ancestral identities.

Historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence test the phylogenetic inference of Viking-Age plant use.

In this paper, past plant knowledge serves as a case study to highlight the promise and challenges of interdisciplinary data collection and interpretation in cultural evolution. Plants are central to human life and yet, apart from the role of major crops, people–plant relations have been marginal to the study of culture. Archaeological, linguistic, and historical evidence are often limited when it comes to studying the past role of plants. This is the case in the Nordic countries, where extensive collections of various plant use records are absent until the 1700s. Here, we test if relatively recent ethnobotanical data can be used to trace back ancient plant knowledge in the Nordic countries. Phylogenetic inferences of ancestral states are evaluated against historical, linguistic, and archaeobotanical evidence. The exercise allows us to discuss the opportunities and shortcomings of using phylogenetic comparative methods to study past botanical knowledge. We propose a ‘triangulation method’ that not only combines multiple lines of evidence, but also quantitative and qualitative approaches.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’.

LINGUISTIC NUANCES AND CREATIVE TECHNIQUES IN CHIKA UNIGWE'S SELECT NOVELS

This paper examines the practical application of linguistic and creative tools in Chika Unigwe’ s On Black Sisters’ Street and Night Dancer. This study relies significantly on the notion of stylistics, with its creative and linguistic naunces, to enhance a more holistic understanding and appreciation of the select texts. Based on linguistic evidence, the novels reveal the physical and psychic effects of the postcolonial realities on the post-colonial subjects. The descriptive system of the texual analysis shows that the artistic values of the novels are illuminated primarily through the language and creative techniques employed by the author in the select novels. Unigwe’s creative manipulation of languages in the select texts shows that most Nigerian writers in particular have eventually arrived at a linguistic compromise between the target and the indigenous languages as well as pidgin. This does not just reflect the dexterousness of the author as a story teller with exciting linguistic, stylistic, and structural awareness but indeed, the nature of Nigeria as a dense linguistic ecology. The author’s skillful manipulation of the English language in such a way that it still encapsulates the indigenous knowledge and culture, as well as the striking creative techniques employed makes her message vigorous and captivating to the readers since they invoke clear mental pictures, code variation, linguistic appositioning/substitution, transliteration, narrative framing and other stylistic peculiarities, all for linguistic foregrounding, artistic beauty and signification. It is the opinion of this paper that more African writers, especially young and developing writers should creatively use the languages both foreign and indigenous at their disposal not just to suit the African milieu or experience but to promote the indigenous languages, and also widen and deepen the aesthetic taste of their artistic productions.

Crossed control revisited; The structure and interpretations of “want” and so on + passive verb in Malay/Indonesian

In Malay/Indonesian, when certain predicates such as “want” are followed by a passive verb, an ambiguity arises about who has the desire and other attitudes in question. The attitude-holder can be either the surface subject or the passive agent. This article critically assesses the data and claims presented in three recent studies (Mike Berger 2019; Paul Kroeger and Kristen Frazier 2020; Helen Jeoung 2020) through consideration of additional data. It shows that the ambiguity is empirically robust, contrary to the doubts expressed by Jeoung, and that the restructuring analysis advocated by the latter two studies has problems with its primary evidence: alternate voice marking realization. Instead, the paper confirms the previous understanding of the construction, including a bi-clausal structure with a dyadic matrix predicate and the importance of voice marking. Methodologically, it demonstrates that linguistic evidence should come from multiple sources, that is, not from elicitation or texts alone but from both of these (and perhaps more).

From dugouts to double outriggers; Lexical insights into the development of Swahili nautical technology

The early history of nautical technology in the western Indian Ocean and adjoining parts of the eastern Africa coast is poorly understood. In the absence of evidence from shipwrecks, it has hitherto been based largely on the uncertain interpretation of a few documentary references and speculation surrounding technological parallels and assumed lexical resemblances. This paper examines some of the linguistic evidence in a more rigorous way, by undertaking a cross-dialectal comparison of names for watercraft and terms for outriggers in Swahili ( Kiswahili ), a Bantu language spoken on the islands and in scattered communities along the western seaboard of the Indian Ocean. The resulting analysis provides a new outline of the development of Swahili nautical technology and maritime culture, highlighting the key role played by particular boat forms, and the relative importance of indigenous innovation and different external influences, including the elusive impacts of Austronesian seafaring.

SWEAR WORDS AS A TOOL OF EVIDENCE FOR INVESTIGATION OF VERBAL CRIMES SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC BASED FORENSIC LINGUISTICS STUDY (UNGKAPAN MAKIAN SEBAGAI ALAT BUKTI INVESTIGASI TINDAK KEJAHATAN VERBAL KAJIAN LINGUISTIK FORENSIK BERBASIS SEMANTIK DAN PRAGMATIK)

The linguistic forensic is one of the branches of applied linguistics related to the law i.e. language as proof in civil case or. One form of the linguistic phenomenon that is used as a tool of investigation evidence of verbal crimes is the use of the word cuss. The use of the word cuss is one of the linguistic evidence that can have a different meaning depending on the context that is behind it. The focus of this study is to identify linguistic texts containing the word that potentials affect the law. This study aims to uncover the implicit meaning of the word and describe the use of negative connotations that can lead to conflicts and legal cases. The forensic linguistic approach method is a method of implementing languages that can solve language-based problems in various legal contexts. The results of this study show that forensic linguistics on the analysis of the linguistic structure of the phrase in semantic terms, pragmatic and analysis of discourse relating to the legal texts can be utilized by the judge or the police to uncover the truth and know the violation of verbal crimes such as hate speech, humiliation, or defamation.