Authorship attribution is one of the largest areas of Forensic Linguistics. It entails determining who wrote, or more commonly, ruling out who wrote a text when authorship is unclear. Linguists assume that each particular choice the writer makes as a whole will enable identification as authors are consistent in their choices. Linguists have three main problematic scenarios when attempting authorship attribution; there is no candidate set and a profile is required, there are many candidates for a limited sample and verification where one determines whether the suspect is the author or not. In regards to whether a communication was written by the suspect or deceased, we would need to focus upon the third scenario. Documents that would entail authorship dispute regarding a deceased individual would include wills, last testaments and suicide notes.
In the case of a suicide note being left behind the linguist has several issues to consider. Most importantly, why the deceased may have committed suicide. Normally it has little relevance to the linguist why a person commits a crime or does something but knowing the reasons why will help distinguish genuine from simulated and it is almost always the first question relatives ask. In order to discover why, it is useful to know what friends and family feel after initial grief. Common views are that the person was crazy, a coward or a loser. This popular view of suicide helps the linguist to an extent as a fake suicide note is more likely to reflect popular attitudes instead of how the person actually feels.
One of the main approaches to the methodology of authorship attribution is the Unitary Invariant Approach which was pioneered by Mendenhall (1887) who sought to distinguis...
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...Eds.) Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora. Ch.4, p.53-65. London: Longman.
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H Baayen, H van Halteren, and F Tweedie
Outside the cave of shadows: using syntactic annotation to enhance authorship attribution
Lit Linguist Computing 1996 11: 121-132.
Palmer, William. "Rhetorical Analysis." Discovering Arguments: An Introduction to Critical Thinking, Writing, and Style. Boston: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2012. 268-69. Print.
The show portrays that forensic anthropologists are responsible for almost every aspect of the death investigation, which does not correctly depict the role of forensic anthropologists (Wood,2017a). The method of which components of the biological profile, like sex of the remains, is also incorrectly portrayed as Dr. Brennan estimated the sex using a trait that does not accurately indicate sexual dimorphism (Wood, 2017c). Lastly, the complexity of personal identification, which is one of the most important aspects of forensic anthropology casework (Krishan et al, 2016), is not portrayed correctly as Dr. Brennan and her team based the identification of the remains on one trait that has questionable reliability (Charles & Levisetti, 2011). All in all, ‘The feet on the beach’ episode of ‘Bones’ does not accurately portray the forensic anthropology as it is romanticized for entertainment and overly simplified for a lay person to
The purpose of forensic rhetoric is to establish guilt and give punishment. It focuses mainly on the promising judgment. It incorporates any discussion from the past as well as legal discourse and it contrasts with epideictic and deliberative rhetoric which are reserved for discussion regarding present and future actions respectively. In the contemporary world, the term forensic is mostly associated with the civil and criminal law that refers specifically to forensic science and it is worth noting that the term is associated with criminal investigations since judicial rhetoric existed in the first
Brothwell,D.R (1986) 'Clues to Murder', in Brothwell,D.R (ed.) The bog man and the archaeology of people . London: British Museum, pp. 22-44.
Forensic psychology is an area of psychology that has been rapidly gaining popularity in recent years. Entertainment media’s fascination with the intersection of crime and psychology has fueled the growing interest in the field. According to Jane Tyler Ward, PhD, forensic psychology can be defined as psychology that “emphasizes the application of research and experimentation in other areas of psychology to the legal arena.” Although forensic psychology is popular right now, it was not until 1962 that a court case set the precedent that properly trained psychologists could provide expert testimony (Page 20). Additionally, forensic psychology was not APA (American Psychological Association) certified until 2001 (Page 16). The field of forensic
"Forensic science." UXL Encyclopedia of Science. U*X*L, 2007. Student Resources in Context. Web. 27 Apr. 2014.
Writing can be very frustrating; laying your ideas out on paper so that others can grasp the concept you are trying to convey is a very difficult task. In Writing 101 I have learned how to formulate good theses that are arguable and also how to validate articles that have to do with my topic. The most important element of a paper is the thesis statement. It captures the reader's attention and tells them what the essay is about. Having a well-structured thesis along with evidence to support that thesis are the main ingredients to a well-written essay. I have also learned how important it is to research an author’s background to ensure their credibility. This is a very important step in writing because today we can find information on a topic, however, it is not valid. By researching the author, we can see if he or she is an expert in the area and so this would make his or her information more credible. There is a ...
Forensic Psychology, which is occasionally referred to as Legal Psychology, originally made its debut in the late 1800’s. A Harvard Professor, Professor Munsterberg, introduced the idea of psychology and law with his book, On the Witness Stand in 1908. Since the inception of the idea of psychology and law there have been proponents, as well as though that have spoken against the theories proposed by Munsterberg’s, along with other scientists, theorists, and psychologists that believed that Forensic Psychology had no standing to be linked to topics of law. This literature review will attempt to identify scholarly articles that trace the origins and the movement that led to Forensics Psychology becoming a specialty within the field of psychology. I will also attempt to explain What is Forensic Psychology as well as the part it plays within the legal system.
This paper will explain the process we, as humans usually follow to understand a certain text or utterance. This explanation would be achieved through the analysis of two journal articles from semantics and pragmatics perspective, taking into account a range of techniques associated with each of the two concepts including:
Gilbert, Sarah M. and Gubar, Susan. "From the Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship." The Critical Condition: Classic Texts andContemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 1361-74.
According to Chartier, there is evidence that the author served a functional role in the reading of texts in Medieval Europe (31, 59). Foucault acknowledges that in the Middle Ages, anonymous authorship of “literary” texts was common, while the veracity of scientific texts was judged by the authority of the text’s author (31).
Radford, A. (2004) English Syntax: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, ISBN 0 521 54275 8 (paperback)
The interpretation of sentence is an important factor when looked at through the prism of context and since the beginning of 1950 linguists have become increasingly aware of this importance. J. R. Firth, who is considered to be the founder of modern British linguistics, notes that logicians think of words and propositions as carrying meaning in themselves and this meaning is “apart from participants in context of situation” (1957: 226). This approach seems to exclude the speakers and the listeners, Firth thinks, and he suggests that “voices should not be entirely dissociated from the social context in which they function”. Firth’s suggestion was to regard all texts in modern spoken languages as having “implication of utterance” and participants as always referred to in a “generalized context of situations” (1957: 226). Firth is concerned with embedding the utterance in the “social context” which is later supported by Hymes in his works of early 60s. Hymes treats the role of context in interpretation and analysis as an aspect that limits the array of possible interpretations and at the same time a support...
Foucault 's essay “What is an author” explores the relationship between author, text, and reader. Foucaults essay seems to be an implicit response to Barthes 's famous essay "The Death of the Author." as Foucault argues that the issue of the disappearance or death of the author has not been developed sufficiently, and needs further consideration, beginning with the clarification of what constitutes a “work.” Foucault wants to discuss the relationship between an author and a text, and the manner in which the text points to the author as a figure who is outside the text, and who precedes it. Foucault draws upon the function of the author to provide a discourse of the difference between an author and a writer, and whether or not such a characterisation
Numerous studies have provided definitions of DMs. In spite of the various studies, there is no universal agreement on the definition and classification of DMs. Researchers use different terms to refer to DMs: discourse markers (Schiffrin, 1987), discourse particles (Aijmer, 2002; Schourup, 1985), pragmatic markers (Fraser, 1990; Brinton, 1996), pragmatic expressions (Erman, 1987, 1992), pragmatic connectives (Stubbs, 1983), sentence connectives (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), discourse connectives (Blakemore, 1987, 1992), discourse operators (Redeker, 1991), and continuatives (Romero Trillo, 1997). Such various terms, in Fung and Carter’s (2007) words, display plentiful research interests, analytical categories and difficulty in explaining them