Psychiatrists, alongside other medical experts, have a role in applying clinical and scientific expertise in legal contexts. The courts use expert evidence when dealing with matters outside the knowledge of the layperson, in particular the judge and jury. Forensic psychiatry training has a particular focus on the care and treatment of offenders with mental disorder. Forensic psychiatry practitioners are expected to have not only specialised knowledge of mental disorder but also detailed knowledge of the relevant legal issues and justice systems. It is crucial that psychiatrists acting as expert witnesses understand the nature of the legal issues in order to function competently at court. This chapter outlines the role of the psychiatrist as an expert witness and summarises legal issues on which forensic psychiatrists are asked to comment in criminal settings, namely fitness to plead, mental health defences and sentencing.

The right to a fair trial is embedded in human rights law. For a trial to be fair, the accused needs to be an active participant – to understand what they have been charged with and to be able answer that charge in a meaningful way. Laws relating to fitness to plead, or competence to stand trial, have developed in many jurisdictions and are designed to protect vulnerable defendants and in some cases divert them into healthcare. There are concerns that the law is not currently fit for purpose. Defendants with neurodevelopmental disorders face particular challenges when accused of a criminal charge at court. Many present with communication deficits, poor understanding and cognitive impairments, stereotyped and other abnormal behaviours, and lack of theory of mind. Identifying those who are unfit to plead can be problematic. In this chapter, we describe legal frameworks for fitness to plead and consider how neurodevelopmental disorders can impact an individual’s ability to participate effectively in their trial. We consider how best to identify, assess and support vulnerable defendants to improve their experience at court and ensure their fair trial rights are upheld.

Introduction

In this chapter, we explore how different languages describe events of putting things in places, and how children begin to talk about such events in their very early multi-word utterances. Our aim in focusing on the domain of “putting” events is to allow us to identify some important semantic and psycholinguistic factors that influence the course of acquisition. The overarching question is to determine the extent to which the development of linguistic event representations is influenced by the particular language the child is learning. Events of “putting” are frequently discussed in interactions between caregivers and children, providing us with a rich crosslinguistic database in a high-frequency semantic domain. By examining language-specific characteristics of early event representations, we can make inferences about the cognitive resources and abilities that children bring to the task of learning how to talk about events in their native language.

A major motivation for working crosslinguistically is to investigate the role of language typology in children's mapping of meanings onto forms – in this case, the expression of particular sorts of transitive motion events. In his well-known typology of how languages encode motion events, Talmy (1991, 2000b) distinguishes between ‘satellite-framed’ languages and ‘verb-framed’ languages on the basis of the element in the clause where information about path is characteristically encoded. Our analyses show that this typological distinction does play an important role in the course of language acquisition, but other features that crosscut this typology play a role as well.

Introduction

This chapter is about gaze behavior in conversation. Using data from three unrelated cultures (or more properly, speech communities), we ask whether there are, on the basis of these three cultures, plausible candidates for universal patterns of gazing during interaction, and where, on the contrary, we may expect to find culturally specific patterns. This focus is already rather different than the tenor of most of the other papers in this volume. Moreover, because of this focus, a central part is played by basic descriptive statistics, rather than the qualitative analysis of specific episodes.

Despite these foci and the methods adopted, we see this paper as addressing some central issues posed by conversation analysis (CA). We are interested in a pervasive conversational practice, namely when participants gaze at one another during conversation. There has been relatively little published work in CA on the systematics of gaze, and what there has been (e.g., by Goodwin 1981) will be shown by our data not to provide a possible general analysis of the phenomena.

Introduction

How does one refer to persons in conversation? How does one pick out an individual from the myriad people in one's social world, so that the interlocutor(s) can home in on a specific individual with known properties – a face, a name, a social identity, a personality – immediately called up? This is a problem that is both frequent and universal, since talking about individual people – what they did, where they went, what they are like, what should be done with them or about them – preoccupies a large proportion of conversations around the world.

Achieving reference of any kind is a matter of achieving mental coordination, and person reference is perhaps especially tricky because participants have to coordinate on a definite, unique individual, not just a class of individuals. Foundational work in conversation analysis (Sacks and Schegloff 1979, reprinted this volume; Schegloff 1996a; see Introduction, this volume) has claimed that how reference to persons is formulated is governed by two basic preferences:

1. recognitionals are preferred: that is, when the recipient knows the individual, use a referring expression that allows him/her to recognize the intended individual – for example, a name, or a recognitional descriptor, a description ‘designed for the recipient and chosen to indicate how the recipient knows the referent’. There also appears to be a preference for names over descriptive expressions in English-speaker talk.

2. minimal referring expressions are preferred: that is, using just one referring expression. This means one discrete reference form, however lengthy it has to be to identify the referent to the recipient in the context.

Introduction

Space in Mayan languages

Mayan languages and cultures have a reputation for having highly elaborated conceptions of space and time. Two largely independent streams of research converge on this point: on the one hand, there are several articles and monographs exploring modern-day versions of ancient Mayan calendrical, divination, ritual and cosmological systems in their spatial and temporal dimensions (Villa Rojas 1973, Gossen 1974, 1986, Tedlock 1982, Vogt 1976). On the other hand, a number of scholars have argued that Mayan languages have highly developed – indeed, hypertrophic – linguistic resources for handling spatial concepts, which are particularly evident in the positional roots, directionals and numeral classifiers that most Mayan languages display in some form (Berlin 1968, Norman 1973, Martin 1977, 1979, England 1978). It has been argued that space is a ‘grammatical theme’ in Mayan languages, that is, an ‘underlying organizational principle’ that pervades the grammar (England 1978: 226); it is also a cultural theme pervading Mayan ethnographies. And, England argues, where such correspondences between linguistic and cultural themes are found, we are justified in expecting to find ‘a substantial and powerful aspect of the world view of a particular group’ (Ibid.).

Some recent work attempts more systematically to link these two streams, the linguistic and the ethnographic. A good example is Hanks's (1990) analysis of the deictic system of a group of Yucatec Mayan speakers, embedded in the ethnography of how these Yucatec Mayans conceptualize domestic and local spaces and how they operate in their physical and social world.