Wordcrime: Solving Crime Through Forensic Linguistics by Olsson John

Author:Olsson, John [Olsson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Table 14.2. Distribution of selected singular/dual pronouns in a small corpus of news articles and email texts

From Table 14.2 we see that the selected first and second personal pronouns are virtually non-existent in news articles, but of relatively high frequency in email texts. Hence, results from Tables 14.1 and 14.2 appear to indicate that if comparing texts of different types then we should not rely on frequency counts of some common function words for authorship purposes: the text type and genre influences are likely to skew the result. For example, if we took emails and news articles for the same writer, there is no reason to believe that we would not find that exemplars of each text type would follow the above pattern.

This is why we need to treat terms such as ‘context-free’ and ‘context-dependent’ with some caution. While function words may be context-free in theory, or less context-dependent than lexical words, it does not seem that the concept of ‘context-dependence’ is a useful one when we are undertaking such a precise task as authorship attribution. Authorship attribution is a serious task, especially where people’s reputations, liberty and even, on occasion, lives, are at stake and defin itions which may be useful in academic discussions, are not necessarily useful when applied to precise and important tasks such as authorship attribution. Following presentation of my analysis to the court, the flying club withdrew their allegations against Mr Johnson and paid him substantial damages for the distress they had caused him. Nobody knows quite what the management of the club were thinking when they launched this action against one of their most loyal members. At one point Mr Johnson observed officials from the club photographing his young grandchildren playing in the garden from a parked car, which is equally inexplicable behaviour.4

As to Professor Willerby I have not heard of any further ventures of his into forensic linguistics, and while I wish him a long and successful career in his chosen field, I trust that that will remain the case until such time as he acquires the appropriate knowledge and experience to deal with issues which are, at the present time, outside of his customary domain.

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