Forensic stylistics Theory and practice of forensic stylistics

Abstract

The principal focus of forensic stylistics is on authorship identification: the linguistic analysis of style in written language for the purpose of excluding or identifying one or more possible authors of a writing whose authorship is questioned. This chapter reviews the theoretical and methodological bases for using linguistic stylistics as a tool in cases of questioned authorship. Linguistic style, as a reflection of group or individual variation, can be described and measured. A qualitative analysis is the first step toward the discovery, analysis and interpretation of style. Quantitative analysis of style is a powerful complement to its description and can be important to successful analysis and interpretation of style, especially in authorship studies. Corpus studies are most useful in this respect. There are some specific issues that merit separate discussion and exemplification: determining what is a diagnostic style marker, the relationship of qualitative to quantitative analysis, the amount and type of data needed for quantification vis-a-vis case data that is often limited, and judicial vs. linguistic criteria for forensic studies. Finally, I discuss the known limitations of forensic stylistics, along with some putative limitations suggested over time, especially by analysts who have little understanding of the nature of linguistic variation.