Authorship Analysis, Social Networks and Catalan

Abstract

This paper presents data that can help determine whether factors such as gender or age can become significant in authorship analysis through X in Catalan. Considering the principles of forensic linguistics (in particular, authorship analysis and idiolectal style), 500 publications have been analyzed from a stylistic point of view, focusing on three discursive aspects: specific features of X, pragmatic variables and stylistic variables. Contrary to what some authors have found for English X users (Cicres, 2015), the paper shows that, in Catalan, emoticons, exclamations or letter multiplication are not distinctive features for gender or age. However, elements such as the concatenation of hashtags, the use of links, the intensification of first-person subject pronouns, the use of capital letters or the use suspension points can be meaningful for age ¾but not for gender. This paper thus constitutes a first step towards finding truly distinctive elements in the use of X in Catalan, even though more studies, with larger corpora, need to be done to confirm these tendencies.