Forensic Authorship Analysis

Question 1

What is the study of authorship?

Name and date

Answer 1

Approaches using linguistics to identify the authors of documents by the style of their writing

Solan and Tiersma 2004

Question 2

What types of texts are examined?

7 types

Answer 2

• Questioned suicide notes
• Anonymous letters
• Text messages
• Plagiarism and collusion
• Threats
• Blackmail
• Fabricated wills

Question 3

Define dialect

Answer 3

A variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of people

Question 4

Define sociolect

Answer 4

A variety of language used by a socioeconomic class, a profession, an age group or other social group

Question 5

Define ethnolect

Answer 5

A language variety associated with a certain ethnic or cultural subgroup

Question 6

Define idiolect

Answer 6

An individual’s distinctive and unique use of language

Question 7

What was said about idiolects?

Names and Dates x 2

Answer 7

• Every native speaker has their own distinct and individual version of language….this idiolect will manifest itself in their text choices
  Coulthard 2004
• Writers have constant features in their practice springing from ingrained habits of language
  Eagleson 1994

Question 8

What is the stylometry approach?

Answer 8

• Linguistic finger prints
• Relative frequency of function/grammar words
• Word frequency distributions
• Mathematical approach that needs lots of data
• Founded on idiolect ideas
• Detects similarity of texts to determine author

Question 9

What is the stylistic approach?

Answer 9

• Looks at how word choices reflect individual and societal influences
• Looks at statistical occurrence of choices
• Moves away from idiolect and focuses on person’s past uses
• Less statistical than stylometry
• Smaller corpus and includes grammar

Question 10

What is the vocabulary approach?

Answer 10

• Identifies core lexical items and once-only words

- Entirely based in lexis - is this word used commonly or in the lexicon at all?

Question 11

What elements of authorship do we look at?

Name and date

4 levels

Answer 11

Character level: Punctuation and how often things occur next to each other

Word level: Function words, content words, collocations, vocab richness and average word length

Sentence level: Part of speech tagging (eg. isn’t it tag), anaphoric referencing (referencing back), sentence type and sentence length

Text level: Paragraph length, text length and discourse strategies

Chaski 2012

Question 12

Define display text

Answer 12

• Misdirecting text often found in fake suicide notes

- eg. It wasn’t anything to do with my husband

Question 13

Example authorship case

Name and date

Answer 13

• Eagleson 1994
• Sydney man arrested for murder of wife 1981
• Letter supposedly written by wife saying she was leaving but not the husband’s fault (DISPLAY TEXT)
• Stylistic approach, looked at typed farewell letter, husband’s corpus and wife’s corpus
• Character level:
• Assault spelt same by husband and farewell letter
• Common nouns with capitals by husband and farewell letter
• Intrusive apostrophe eg. onion’s

Question 14

Problematic case

Names

Case name

Answer 14

• Jonbenét Ramsey case 1996

Eades:

• How can linguistics determine age of author eg. 30+ and not 21+
• How can they determine if something is a purposeful mistake?

Shuy:
- Linguists cannot know a speaker’s intentions

Butters:
- Claims were made on a sensational tv show, not in a court of law

Question 15

Aboriginal case

Names

Date

Answer 15

• Max Stuart convicted of murder
• Signed confession was manipulated by police officers
• 850 word statement
• Stuart claims he was assaulted and intimidted
• FL Strehlow listened to Stuart’s speech and concluded statement was not his language (stylistic approach?)
• Didn’t fit Northern Territory English as spoken by Aborigines

1959 case started, released 1970