Stylistics versus statistics : a corpus linguistic approach to combining techniques in forensic authorship analysis using Enron emails
This thesis empirically investigates how a corpus linguistic approach can address the main theoretical and methodological challenges facing the field of forensic authorship analysis. Linguists approach the problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that each person has their own distinctive idiolect (Coulthard 2004: 431). However, the notion of idiolect has come under scrutiny in forensic linguistics over recent years for being too abstract to be of practical use (Grant 2010; Turell 2010). At the same time, two competing methodologies have developed in authorship analysis. On the one hand, there are qualitative stylistic approaches, and on the other there are statistical âstylometricâ techniques. This study uses a corpus of over 60,000 emails and 2.5 million words written by 176 employees of the former American company Enron to tackle these issues in the contexts of both authorship attribution (identifying authors using linguistic evidence) and author profiling (predicting authorsâ social characteristics using linguistic evidence). Analyses reveal that even in shared communicative contexts, and when using very common lexical items, individual Enron employees produce distinctive collocation
Wright, David
Stylistics versus statistics : a corpus linguistic approach to combining techniques in forensic authorship analysis using Enron emails. This thesis empirically investigates how a corpus linguistic approach can address the main theoretical and methodological challenges facing the field of forensic authorship analysis. Linguists approach the problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that each person has their own distinctive idiolect (Coulthard 2004: 431). However, the notion of idiolect has come under scrutiny in forensic linguistics over recent years for being too abstract to be of practical use (Grant 2010; Turell 2010). At the same time, two competing methodologies have developed in authorship analysis. On the one hand, there are qualitative stylistic approaches, and on the other there are statistical âstylometricâ techniques. This study uses a corpus of over 60,000 emails and 2.5 million words written by 176 employees of the former American company Enron to tackle these issues in the contexts of both authorship attribution (identifying authors using linguistic evidence) and author profiling (predicting authorsâ social characteristics using linguistic evidence). Analyses reveal that even in shared communicative contexts, and when using very common lexical items, individual Enron employees produce distinctive collocation
stylistics versus statistic corpus_linguistic combine technique forensic authorship analysis use empirically investigate corpus_linguistic address main_theoretical methodological challenge_face field forensic authorship analysis linguists problem question authorship theoretical_position person distinctive however notion come scrutiny forensic linguistics abstract practical use grant time two_compete methodology develop authorship analysis one_hand qualitative stylistic approach statistical technique study use corpus word write employee former american company tackle issue contexts authorship attribution identify author use linguistic_evidence author profiling predict author social characteristic use linguistic_evidence analyses reveal even share communicative_context use common lexical_item individual employee produce distinctive collocation