• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Search for abstracts --- authors title abstract

---

Abstract ID: 504

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Forensic authorship identification in globalised digital communities of practice: the theoretical and methodological implications of a sociolinguistic approach to analysing authorship in Enron emails

Authors: Wright, David; Gomez, Alberto; both presenting, authors
Submitted by: Wright, David (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)

Although recent vital steps have emphasised the importance of sociolinguistic findings for forensic authorship identification (Coulthard et al. 2011:536; Turell 2010:212), authorship analysis methods are often criticised for their lack of linguistic grounding (Butters 2011). In the communicative context of international business email, this paper demonstrates the ways in which exploring the sociolinguistic mechanisms operating in linguistic variation can address this issue and theoretically and methodologically inform forensic authorship analysis. 

Enron, a former American energy company, embodied the concept of globalisation. Enron’s pioneering web-based trading platform ‘EnronOnline’ allowed the company to buy and sell commodity products globally, and this vast online trading environment brought with it a digital (socio)linguistic space occupied by a speech community of transregionally and transnationally networked professionals.

Combining qualitative, computational and statistical methods, this paper analyses a corpus of over 12,000 emails – now a ‘genre of contemporary globalized communication’ (Blommaert 2010:106) – sent by employees from two distinct professional communities of practice (Wenger 1998) within the corporation: traders and lawyers. Analysis identifies a repertoire of linguistic ‘style markers’ in the employees’ emails which are indexical (Johnstone et al. 2006) of their professional identities, responsive to the social and power relationships between sender and recipient, and sensitive to the conventions of the interactional context of the business email genre. Analysis then shifts to measure the diagnostic power of these features of linguistic variation for identifying authorship. First, those features which distinguish the emails of male employees from those of females are explored to examine the extent to which they can be used to detect the gender of the writer(s). Second, the idiolectal uniqueness of the markers identified is tested in a wider corpus of Enron emails to measure their ‘population-level’ distinctiveness.

Results suggest that there exists a range of distinctive lexical, grammatical and discourse features, including technical vocabulary, formulation of requests, salutations and sign-offs that distinguish between the writing styles of this sample of lawyers and traders. Evidence also indicates that these sociolinguistically informed features of linguistic variation can be useful in authorship cases insofar as they allow analysts to discriminate between gender groups and identify individual idiolects. Discussion highlights the implications of sociolinguistic theory and method for forensic authorship analysis.

References

Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Butters, Ron. 2011. Ethics, Standards, and Best Practices. Paper presented at International Association of Forensic Linguists Tenth Biennial Conference, Aston University, Birmingham, UK, 11-14 July 2011.

Coulthard, Malcolm, Tim Grant and Krzysztof Kredens. 2011. Forensic Linguistics. In Ruth Wodak, Barbara Johnstone and Paul Kerswill (eds.). The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics. London: Sage, 531–544.

Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus and Andrew. E. Danielson. 2006. Mobility, Indexicality, and the Enregisterment of “Pittsburghese.” Journal of English Linguistics 32(4): 77–104.

Turell, M. Teresa. 2010. The use of textual, grammatical and sociolinguistic evidence in forensic text comparison. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 17(2): 211–250.

Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.