How much of ourselves do we disclose when we speak or write? A person’s accent may reveal, for example, whether they hail from Australia, or Ireland, or Mississippi. But it’s not just where we were born—we divulge all sorts of information about ourselves and our identity through language. Level of education, gender, age, and even aspects of our personality can all be reliably determined by our vocabulary and grammar. To those who know what to look for, we give ourselves away every time we open our mouths or tap on a keyboard. But how unique is a person’s linguistic identity? Can language be used to identify a specific person? To identify—or to exonerate—a murder suspect? To determine who authored a particular book? The answer to all these questions is yes. Forensic and computational linguists have developed methods that allow linguistic fingerprinting to be used in law enforcement. Similar techniques are used by literary scholars to identify the authors of anonymous or contested works of literature. Many people have heard that linguistic analysis helped to catch the Unabomber, or to unmask an anonymous editorialist—but how is it done? LINGUSISTIC FINGERPRINTS will explain how these methods were developed and how they are used to solve forensic and literary mysteries. But these techniques aren’t perfect, and the book will also include some cautionary tales about mistaken linguistic identity.

This book contains detailed studies of all the major areas of the discipline, including the detection of plagiarism, the observation of style change, and an analysis of all of the most important types of forensic text, including ransom demands, suicide notes, hate mail, smear mail, trick mail and terrorist mail. Perhaps one of the greatest assets of the book is its discussion of specific forensic texts including the 'stalker text' from John Hinckley, an excerpt from the Unabomber case, several 17th century Salem witch trial 'confessions', Susan Smith's confession, and ransom notes from the Lindbergh kidnapping and Carlos the Jackal's ransom demand at Vienna.

This book draws on a range of informal letter corpora and outlines the historical sociolinguistic value of letter analysis.

This volume continues the major work published by the JSNT Supplement Series in the area of Greek linguistics of the New Testament, and explores what the editors believe are crucial phases in the application of linguistics to New Testament Greek. The first half of the volume includes essays on such topics as linguistics and literary criticism, linguistics and historical criticism, and linguistics and rhetoric. The second half includes essays dealing with the relations and uses of individual words, but ranges from oral composition to the value of word frequency in determining authorship. Some of these essays review established models of research; others propose new models and criteria of linguistic analysis.

This book uses a corpus of manuscript letters from Bess of Hardwick to investigate how linguistic features characteristic of spoken communication function within early modern epistolary prose. Using these letters as a primary data source with reference to other epistolary materials from the early modern period (1500-1750), the author examines them in a unique and systematic way. The book is the first of its kind to combine a replicable scribal profiling technique, used to identify holograph and scribal handwriting within the letters, with innovative analyses of the language they contain. Furthermore, by adopting a discourse-analytic approach to the language and making reference to the socio-historical context of language use, the book provides an alternative perspective to the one often presented in traditional historical accounts of English. This volume will appeal to students and scholars of early modern English and historical linguistics.

This Element explores the sentiment and keyword features in both authorship profiling and authorship attribution in social media texts in the Chinese cultural context. The key findings can be summarised as follows: firstly, sentiment scores and keyword features are distinctive in delineating authors' gender and age. Specifically, female and younger authors tend to be less optimistic and use more personal pronouns and graduations than male and older authors, respectively. Secondly, these distinctive profiling features are also distinctive and significant in authorship attribution. Thirdly, our mindset, shaped by our inherent hormonal influences and external social experiences, plays a critical role in authorship. Theoretically, the findings expand authorship features into underexplored domains and substantiate the theory of mindset. Practically, the findings offer some broad quantitative benchmarks for authorship profiling cases in the Chinese cultural context, and perhaps other contexts where authorship profiling analyses have been used. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

In and out of English: For Better, For Worse? is concerned with the impact of English as the lingua franca of today's world, in particular its relationship with the languages of Europe. Within this framework a number of themes are explored, including linguistic imperialism, change as the result of language contact, the concept of the English native speaker, and the increasing need in an enlarged Europe for translation into as well as out of English.

Can an author's preference for expressing modality be quantified and then used as a marker of attribution? This book explores the possibility of using the subjunctive mood as an indicator of style and a marker of authorship in Early Modern English texts. Using three works by the sixteenth-century biblical translator and polemicist, William Tyndale, Elizabeth Bell Canon establishes a predictable preference for certain types of modal expression. The theory of subjunctive use as a marker of attribution was then tested on the anonymous 1533 English translation of Erasmus' Enchiridion Militis Christiani. Also included in this book is a modern English spelling version Tyndale's The Parable of the Wicked Mammon.

The book differs from other 'dictionaries of criticism' in concentrating less on time-honoured rhetorical terms and more on conceptually flexible, powerful and contemporary critical terms. Each entry consists not simply of a 'dictionary definition' but an essay exploring the history and full significance of the term, and its possibilities in contemporary critical discourse.

The articles in this volume focus on the legal, linguistic, historical and literary roles of Jewish women in the Islamic world of the Middle Ages. Drawing heavily on manuscript evidence from the Cairo Genizah, the authors examine the challenges involved in the identification and interpretation of women’s letters from medieval Egypt, the registers of women’s written language, the relations between Jewish women and the Muslim legal system, the conversion of women, visions of women in Hell and gendered readings in the aggadic tradition of Judaism.