Abstract
Forensic authorship analysis is based on the assumption that each speaker has his or her own version of a language, or idiolect, whose linguistic features show a relatively stable recurrence (Coulthard et al., 2011). In linguistics, there is a great disparity between knowledge of the concept of idiolect and its study using empirical data (Barlow, 2013). In this cross-genre study, we fill in some of these gaps with data from written and spoken corpora of Mexican Spanish. By analysing word n-grams, we identify four areas of idiolectal stability in Spanish: evaluative language and expressions of quantity, deontic modality and epistemic modality. Our results show that grammatical constructions are useful in authorship analysis, considering the forensic context, combining linguistically reasoned analyses with quantitative tools. We also provide a linguistic analysis grounded on the usage-based construction grammar theory, which adequately accounts for the recurrent personal use of idiolectal constructions.
| Translated title of the contribution | Idiolectal stability of Spanish across four communicative genres: contributions to forensic authorship analysis |
|---|---|
| Original language | Spanish |
| Pages (from-to) | 285-304 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Revista de Llengua i Dret |
| Issue number | 79 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 21 Jun 2023 |
Bibliographical note
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/]Keywords
- idiolect
- forensic authorship analysis
- Spanish linguistics
- forensic linguistics
- idiolectal variation
- idiolectal stability