Special Methods of Forensic Linguistic Analysis and “Expert Phantoms” (Reflections upon Reading the Works of R.S. Belkin's on Criminalistics)

The article discusses some special methods and approaches to forensic linguistic analysis that may lead to the occurrence of “expert phantoms”, or speculative contradictory findings instead of science-based linguistic facts. The use of linguistic methods that modify the original text as a piece of linguistic evidence, or artificially create a new virtual object (“complex separate text”) by combining different texts, can be seen as the basis for evaluating an expert’s opinion as irrelevant or inadmissible evidence.