Orthographic Data in Forensic Linguistic Authorship Analysis

Abstract

The role and status of orthographic data (henceforth OD) in an anonymous authorship analysis is a much debated issue in a much debated field of forensic linguistics. Several methodological, theoretical and, even more so, practical-analytical questions have not been dealt with satisfactorily. Some have not been given adequate answers to date. Others have not even been stated properly as questions. Yet others have not received the general linguist’s attention, even though the practitioners’ concerns and interests have been articulated thoroughly (and vice versa, practitioners have not taken general linguistic data into account properly). Obviously, at times there is some kind of miscommunication going on between the two. This chapter elaborates on the methodological and theoretical status of OD by giving heuristic taxonomies of classes of OD from a systemic grammatical, sociolinguistic, and text linguistic perspective. The focus of the chapter is on the “diagnostic potential” (Kniffka 1996c) that may or may not be assessed for OD in the context of authorship analysis. All data (items, features, analyses) presented are taken from real life forensic cases, dating from 1974 to the present time, in which the author gave expert testimony for German courts and other authorities. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate the complex status of OD by introducing an extensional definition of the phenomena and some additional necessary distinctions, and by clarifying the position of OD in the context of argumentation in forensic linguistic authorship analysis.