Vol. 9 (2020)
Forensic Linguistics: New Procedures and Standards

Research Articles

Text-Linguistic Analysis in Forensic Authorship Attribution

Published 17.02.2021

  • Eilika Fobbe

Eilika Fobbe
Federal Crime Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt)

Abstract

Authorship analysis of anonymous texts is one of the more frequently required tasks in a forensic setting. Its main purpose is either to gain information on the author’s linguistic and social background to support an investigation or to match an anonymous text to a suspect’s previous writings. One approach to authorship attribution is pragmatic stylistic analysis, which is grounded in text-linguistic research, cf. Brinker (2002), Sandig (2006), Püschel (2009), and Brinker et al. (2018), and holds a broad and holistic view on style. In its analyses, it focuses on the functional and pragmatic aspects of style as part of a communicative strategy. A central element, especially in Brinker’s approach, is the thematic text pattern. How individuals argue, how they arrange textual patterns and how they express their demands most certainly reveal aspects of their individuality (Brinker, 2002; Brinker et al., 2018), suggesting that these cannot be easily suppressed or disguised. The paper applies Brinker’s approach to three very short anonymous extortion letters illustrating how text-linguistic analysis can contribute to authorship attribution. Firstly, the text structure of the letters will be analyzed and secondly, the relations between text pattern and stylistic features will be examined in detail, and the relevance of the text patterns will be discussed with reference to the author’s idiolect. The paper aims to point out the possibilities of a more in-depth textual analysis beyond the analysis of surface structures, especially in cases of very small data sets.

Cite as: Fobbe, JLL 9 (2020), 93–114, DOI: 10.14762/jll.2020.093

Keywords

text-linguistics, genre, stylistics, thematic text pattern, authorship analysis, extortion letter

PDF

Author Biography

Eilika Fobbe

KT 34-2 (Autorenerkennung)

Referentin

References

  1. Adamzik, Kirsten (2018). Textlinguistik. In Liedtke & Tuchen (Eds.), Handbuch Pragmatik (pp. 53–64). Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler.
  2. Anonymous (n. d.). Death of JonBenét Ramsey. Evidence. Ransom note. Retrieved August 26, 2020, from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_JonBenét_Ramsey.
  3. Anonymous (2012). Accusations. Retrieved October 25, 2020, from introductiontoproject.blogspot.com/2012/11/accusations.html.
  4. Anonymous (2016). Ransom note. Retrieved January 5, 2021, from imperva.com/blog/how-to-respond-to-ddos-ransom.
  5. Artmann, Peter (1996). Tätertexte. Eine linguistische Analyse der Textsorten Erpresserbrief und Drohbrief. Inauguraldissertation Universität Würzburg. München.
  6. Bierwisch, Manfred (1992). Recht linguistisch gesehen. In Grewendorf (Ed.), Rechtskultur als Sprachkultur. Zur forensischen Funktion der Sprachanalyse (pp. 42–68). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp (stw; 1030).
  7. Brinker, Klaus (2000a). Textstrukturanalyse. In Brinker, Antos, Heinemann & Sager (Eds.), Handbuch Text- und Gesprächslinguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung (pp. 164–175). Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
  8. Brinker, Klaus (2000b). Textfunktionale Analyse. In Brinker, Antos, Heinemann & Sager (Eds.), Handbuch Text- und Gesprächslinguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung (pp. 175–186). Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
  9. Brinker, Klaus (2000c). Zum Problem der Autorenerkennung aus textlinguistischer Sicht (am Beispiel von Erpresserschreiben). In Baldauf (Ed.), 2. Symposion Autorenerkennung des Bundeskriminalamtes vom 03. bis 05. April 2000 (pp. 34–53). Wiesbaden: Bundeskriminalamt.
  10. Brinker, Klaus (2002). Textsortenbeschreibung auf handlungstheoretischer Grundlage (am Beispiel des Erpresserbriefs). In Adamzik (Ed.), Texte – Diskurse – Interaktionsrollen. Analysen zur Kommunikation im öffentlichen Raum (pp. 41–59). Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
  11. Brinker, Klaus, Cölfen, Hermann & Pappert, Steffen (2018). Linguistische Textanalyse. Eine Einführung in Grundbegriffe und Methoden. 9., durchgesehene Auflage. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.
  12. Carter, Ronald & Nash, Walter (1990). Seeing Through Language: A Guide to Styles of English Writing. Oxford: Blackwell.
  13. Chaski, Carole E. (2012). Author Identification In The Forensic Setting. In Tiersma & Solan (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law (pp. 489–503). Oxford: OUP.
  14. Clark, Billy (2018). Stylistics and relevance theory. In Burke (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics (pp. 155–174). London/New York: Routledge.
  15. Cluley, Graham (2016). Here’s what an Ashley Madison blackmail letter looks like. Retrieved October 01, 2020, from grahamcluley.com/ashley-madison-blackmail-letter.
  16. Coulthard, Malcom & Johnson, Alison (Eds. 2010). An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence. Reprint. London/New York: Routledge.
  17. Declerck, Renaat (2010). Future time reference expressed by be to in Present-day English. English Language and Linguistics, 14(2), 271–291. DOI: 10.1017/S1360674310000080.
  18. Dern, Christa (2003). Unhöflichkeit ist es nicht. Sprachliche Höflichkeit in Erpresserschreiben. Deutsche Sprache, 31(3), 127–141. DOI: 10.37307/j.1868-775X.2003.02.03.
  19. Dern, Christa (2009). Autorenerkennung. Theorie und Praxis der linguistischen Tatschreibenanalyse. Stuttgart: Boorberg.
  20. Esser, Jürgen (2009). Introduction to English Text-linguistics. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang.
  21. Ehrhardt, Sabine (2018). Authorship attribution analysis. In Visconti (Ed.), Handbook of Communication in the Legal Sphere (pp. 169–200). Boston/Berlin: de Gruyter.
  22. Feilke, Helmuth (2000). Die pragmatische Wende in der Textlinguistik. In Brinker, Antos, Heinemann & Sager (Eds.), Handbuch Text- und Gesprächslinguistik: Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung (pp. 64–82). Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
  23. Fetzer, Anita (2018). Discourse analysis. In Jucker, Schneider & Bulbitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics (pp. 395–423). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
  24. Fix, Ulla (2004). Stil gibt immer etwas zu verstehen. Der Deutschunterricht, 56(1), 41–50.
  25. Fobbe, Eilika (2011). Forensische Linguistik. Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Narr.
  26. Fobbe, Eilika (in press) (2021). Stilkonzepte in der automatisierten Autorschaftsattribution im forensischen Kontext. In Luttermann & Busch (Eds.), Recht und Sprache: Konstitutions- und Transferprozesse in nationaler und europäischer Dimension (Rechtslinguistik, 11). Berlin/Münster/London: LIT.
  27. Grant, Tim (2007). Quantifying the Evidence in Forensic Authorship Analysis. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 14(1), 1–26. DOI: 10.1558/ijsll.v14i1.1.
  28. Grant, Tim (2008). Approaching Questions in Forensic Authorship Analysis. In Gibbons & Turell (Eds.), Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics (pp. 215–230). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  29. Hansen, Sandra (2009). Verwaltungssprache in Erpresserbriefen. In Bachmann-Stein & Stein (Eds.), Mediale Varietäten – Analysen von gesprochener und geschriebener Sprache und ihre fremdsprachlichen Potenziale (pp. 295–312). Landau: Verlag Empirische Pädagogik.
  30. Iqbal, Farkhund, Hadjidj, Rachid, Fung, Benjamin C. M. & Debbabi, Mourad (2008). A novel approach of mining write-prints for authorship attribution in e-mail forensics. Digital investigation 5, 42–51. DOI: 10.1016/j.diin.2008.05.001.
  31. Kniffka, Hannes (2007). Working in Language and Law. A German perspective. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
  32. König, Ekkehard & Pfister, Manfred (2017). Literary Analysis and Linguistics. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.
  33. Levinson, Steven C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP.
  34. McMenamin, Gerald R. (2010). Forensic stylistics. Theory and practice of forensic stylistics. In Coulthard & Johnson (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics (pp. 487–507). London/New York: Routledge.
  35. Püschel, Ulrich (2009). Stil: Theorie und Praxis. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik, 50, 47–68.
  36. Sandig, Barbara (2006). Textstilistik des Deutschen. 2nd ed. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
  37. Shuy, Roger (2006). Linguistics in the Courtroom. A Practical Guide. Oxford: OUP.
  38. Spillner, Bernd (2009). Verfahren stilistischer Textanalyse. In Fix, Gardt & Knape (Eds.), Rhetorik und Stilistik. Ein internationales Handbuch historischer und systematischer Forschung (pp. 1739–1782). Berlin/New York: de Gruyter Mouton.
  39. Stamatatos, Efstathios (2009). A Survey of Modern Authorship Attribution Methods. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(3), 538–556. DOI: 10.1002/asi.21001.
  40. Stamatatos, Efstathios (2018). Masking Topic-Related Information to Enhance Authorship Attribution. In Journal of the Association for Information Science and technology 69(3), 461–473. DOI: 10.1002/asi.23968.
  41. Stein, Stephan & Baldauf, Christa (2000). Feste sprachliche Einheiten in Erpresserbriefen. Empirische Analysen und Überlegungen zu ihrer Relevanz für die forensische Textanalyse. In Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 28(3), pp. 377–403. DOI: 10.1515/zfgl.2000.28.3.377.
  42. Toolan, Michael (2014). The Theory and Philosophy of Stylistics. In Stockwell (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (pp. 13–31). Cambridge: CUP.
  43. Wright, David (2013). Stylistic variation within genre conventions in the Enron email corpus: developing a text sensitive methodology for authorship research. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 20, 1, 45–75. DOI: 10.1558/ijsll.v20i1.45.