Lecturer

Ph.D. in Linguistics
University of Georgia

OFFICE: 122 Modern Languages Bldg
EMAIL: betsy.l.barry@emory.edu 
Office hours: TBA

Betsy is a linguist with over 15 years of experience working in industry, mainly the legal field. She considers herself a combination of corpus linguist, language variationist, and forensic linguist, as well as a "text as evidence" expert. Her small company has developed proprietary forensic linguistic software that quickly and precisely investigates huge collections of unstructured text for key evidence.

She has spent the last dozen years studying, assessing, and investigating business communications of Fortune 500 companies, mostly in the context of complex civil litigation. She has researched literally millions of words, phrases, and text types, focusing on how patterns of linguistic behavior emerge in large collections of unstructured text, and how these patterns of linguistic behavior support (or refute) legal narratives that are the centerpieces of legal disputes. She has worked as a forensic linguistic consultant and expert on several dozen civil cases and a handful of criminal ones.