Jennifer James Plumb studies the intersection of law and language, with current work on police-civilian interactions and emergency-call genres.
Research focus
Precise analysis for high-stakes language
Her work asks how speakers build urgency, accountability, and credibility moment by moment: through wording, repair, category labels, footing, and sequential position.
Emergency services calls
Swatting and fabricated narratives
Race and gender in language
Methods & tools
Methods and analytical tools
The analytical toolkit behind the research — systematic linguistic methods brought to bear on high-stakes, real-world interaction.
Genre analysis
Discourse analysis
Conversation analysis
Appraisal analysis
Interactional sociolinguistics
Pragmatics
Corpus linguistics
Systemic functional linguistics
Selected work
Scholarship on language and law
Current research centers on fabricated emergency reports and the genre expectations that make them recognizable.
‘I just shot my mom’: A genre analysis of swatting calls
Jennifer James Plumb and Mark Winston Visonà examine swatting calls as a genre of fabricated emergency reporting, connecting linguistic form with interactional sequence and genre expectation.
Discourse Studies
2025
Forensic discourse analysis
Emergency-call genre
Talks & presentations
Recent conference presentations
Selected talks and posters in forensic linguistics, 2023 to 2026.
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Jun 2026
Epistemic stance-taking by white women involved in criminal trespass complaints
IAFLL 6th European Conference, Montpellier (poster)
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Oct 2025
Negotiating epistemic and family identities in fabricating critical incidents
Language and Social Interaction Working Group Conference
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Sep 2025
Membership Categorization & Epistemic Uncertainty in Swatting Calls to a U.S. University
Forensic Conversations in Criminal Justice Settings Symposium
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Jul 2025
“I just shot my mom”: a genre analysis of swatting calls
IAFLL 17th Biennial Conference
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Nov 2024
The Nature of Your Emergency: a genre analysis of 9-1-1 swatting calls
National Communication Association Convention
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Nov 2024
Moves and steps analysis of emergency services calls
Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics Roundtable
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Dec 2023
Discourse analysis of 9-1-1 calls
Language as Evidence Conference, Hofstra University
Contact
Open a conversation
For research collaborations, talks, graduate-level academic opportunities, or language-and-law projects — send a note, or connect through the public profiles.