“American trial judges are unwilling to admit a linguist as expert witness in court because they claim that any normal person can understand a conversation when they first hear it, and that to analyse talk in depth is to impose false levels of meaning on 'common-sense' understandings. They also resist the idea that repeated listenings to a tape may reveal to observers new, but no less 'genuine', meanings than were apparent on the first listening. The casualties of this obstinate naïvety are the victims of injustice.” (p. 36)
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