ABSTRACT
It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies. Noam Chomsky
Linguistics first attracted me because I wanted to find an objective and repeatable method for analyzing language. I had majored in English and Ancient Greek, so I was familiar with literary methods, and then earned a Master’s in the Psychology of Reading, so I was also familiar with pedagogic methods. When I finally found psycholinguistics and computational linguistics, I knew I had found an objective and repeatable method-a science of language at last. The first experiment I designed in psycholinguistics investigated how syntactic and semantic paraphrases of text affected professors’ grading: whether stylistic shifts in sentence structure or vocabulary would predict grades (yes, they did). My first project in computational linguistics was modifying a parser so that it could process really natural natural language, the kind of language that people actually produce, with “grammatical errors,” misspellings, abbreviations, etc. (yes, with lots of modifications). Both of these projects influenced my approach to forensics. I was teaching summer-school linguistics to blear-eyed
engineers and technical writers at North Carolina State University, wondering if and praying that there was something useful I could do with linguistics in the real world. The telephone rang. It was Detective W. Allison Blackman of the Raleigh Major Crimes Unit, asking me if there was any way to determine, just from the language itself, who had written a suicide note left on a home computer. There was no ink, no paper, no handwriting, just the language, with three potential authors. Did I think I could do something as a linguist? (Now that was an answer to a prayer, an invitation to use linguistics in the real world.)
Language and law pervade human experience. Just about any human experience can be examined by studying either the linguistic or the legal aspects of it. One might even venture to say that language and law are fundamental to what it means to be a human being. Both law and language provide vast opportunities, but this chapter can only introduce the reader to one small prospect; to explore the case of author identification.
