Idiolect Essay

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This paper centres on the definition, validity and difficulty of identifying idiolect which is also referred to as the ‘linguistic fingerprint’ within written and spoken language. Idiolect is a fairly recent notion that is still quite vague in definition and still needs further development. The extent to which the literal definition of ‘idiolect’ can be deemed reliable within a forensic linguistic investigation is very debatable as it appears to suggest that samples of an individual’s vocabulary can be collected and measured whilst also suggesting that that person’s language use or vocabulary is fixed (Coulthard 2004). It is common knowledge that an individual’s choice of vocabulary can be affected by various factors such as dialect, environment, …show more content…

He therefore separates the concept into two parts which he calls ‘literary stylistics’ and ‘linguistic stylistics’. McMenamin highlights the idea that literary stylistics are conventionally concerned with ‘aesthetic and linguistic conformity matters. Conversely, he refers to linguistic stylistics as an evaluation of perceived style markers that are utilised by both groups and individuals. Burrows (1992) interprets stylometrics as an expansion of literary stylistics, which at its centre has an underlying hypothesis that every author has a unique writing habit which can be seen or portrayed in features such as vocabulary use, sentence structure or complexity and phraseology. This is then grouped and measured or counted. However, one of the most significant assumptions regarding stylistics is that they are fixed and unconscious practices. In addition, the overall purpose of stylometrics especially in a forensic linguistic context is to determine the authorship of a text. As previously mentioned, this is achieved by having a sample of a known authored texts from various authors which can then be likened to the anonymous text in

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