Abstract
In recent years, research on legal discourse has been on the rise in the United
States and United Kingdom. A new discipline, "forensic linguistics" was born
and has developed as part of linguistic research. Although the work of forensic
linguistics in early days was "usually undertaken as an intellectual challenge and
almost always required the creation, rather than simply the application, of a method
of analysis" (Coulthard 1994: 27), the advancement of computer technology since the
1990s and beyond has provided forensic linguists with a new analytical tool, known
as corpus linguistics. This new discipline not only enables them to process a large
volume of data but also provides them with a new method of analyzing those data. In
this paper, I shall first overview the forensic text analysis conducted in the U.K.,
then, evaluate usefulness of corpus linguistics for courtroom discourse analysis and
finally discuss its relevance to interpreter-mediated legal discourse in Japan.
