The language of suicide notes
This thesis reports a study of a corpus of 286 suicide notes collected from the Birmingham Coronerâs Office, with additional findings from 33 real and 33 fabricated notes from Los Angeles. Following some background regarding how suicide notes are treated by Coronersâ Courts and other courts in the U.K, the thesis compares topics used in real and fabricated suicide notes. Although there is considerable overlap between the two categories, they can be partially distinguished by some features that are more likely to occur in one category than the other. For example, dates, indications of author identity and trivia are more likely to occur in real notes than fabricated ones. The thesis then concentrates on fake notes and scrutinises instances of atypical language or phraseology and contextually inappropriate content. It is found that these oddities are far more frequent in the fake notes than in the genuine ones. Finally the thesis focuses on the corpus of genuine notes from the Birmingham Coronerâs Office, using an automatic semantic tagger. The findings are that suicide notes contain significant proportions of items indicating affection, the future and their authorsâ kin. In addition, the notes include
Shapero, Jess Jann
PE English ; P Philology. Linguistics
The language of suicide notes. This thesis reports a study of a corpus of 286 suicide notes collected from the Birmingham Coronerâs Office, with additional findings from 33 real and 33 fabricated notes from Los Angeles. Following some background regarding how suicide notes are treated by Coronersâ Courts and other courts in the U.K, the thesis compares topics used in real and fabricated suicide notes. Although there is considerable overlap between the two categories, they can be partially distinguished by some features that are more likely to occur in one category than the other. For example, dates, indications of author identity and trivia are more likely to occur in real notes than fabricated ones. The thesis then concentrates on fake notes and scrutinises instances of atypical language or phraseology and contextually inappropriate content. It is found that these oddities are far more frequent in the fake notes than in the genuine ones. Finally the thesis focuses on the corpus of genuine notes from the Birmingham Coronerâs Office, using an automatic semantic tagger. The findings are that suicide notes contain significant proportions of items indicating affection, the future and their authorsâ kin. In addition, the notes include
language suicide note report study corpus suicide note collect birmingham office additional finding real note los_angeles following background regard suicide note treat court compare topic use real suicide note although considerable overlap category partially distinguish feature likely occur category other example date indication author identity likely occur real note concentrate fake note instance atypical language phraseology contextually inappropriate content find far frequent fake note genuine finally focus corpus genuine note birmingham office use automatic semantic finding suicide note contain significant_proportion item indicate affection future author kin addition note include