Authorship of Written Documents

Written documents also serve as data for forensic linguistics. In many cases, for example, threats exist in written form. Law enforcement agencies process hundreds of these every year, often calling on the expertise of psychologists to provide what they call a "psychological profile " of the person who sent the message. In fact, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has a profiling unit at its Quantico, Virginia academy. It is only recently, however, that this agency has begun to call on linguists to add the dimension of linguistic profiling to their analyses. Such profiling has two parts. Calling on their knowledge of language indicators of such things as regional and social dialect, age, gender, education, and occupation, linguists analyze documents for broad clues to the identity of the writer. Linguists also provide stylistic analysis of such writings, usually by comparing the document's style with those of other documents written by possible suspects. Stylistic analysis centers on a writer's habitual language features over which the writer has little or no conscious awareness, such as patterns of clause embedding, use of parallel structures, deletion of "that" in that complementizer constructions, mechanical errors, punctuation, discourse features andorganization, and print features such as underlining, bolding or italicizing.

It should be pointed out that linguistic profiling has been most effectively used to narrow down a suspect list rather than to positively identify a suspect. This is not to say that such positive identification is impossible but, rather, that the potential for variability in language use is great and the texts offered for comparison are sometimes dissimilar in genre, register and size.