The Morbid Linguist

Last year, I wrote the literature review part of my thesis. In it, I mentioned stories about Sherlock Holmes and Detective Dupin , between intensive research papers on the topic of Native Language Identification (NLID). My advisor suggested I remove the half-page paragraph in favor of real, pertinent research. Her point was absolutely valid. Writing a literature review is a matter of reading published research relating to a thesis topic and writing a paper about those papers and how they support or otherwise affect one's thesis. Including two literary detectives was pure self-indulgence (and it would mean I could cite Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in my bibliography). The two stories I mentioned are Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue  and Conan Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia . They both include the identification of native language, however briefly, as one of their respective clues. I have always found these fictional examples fascinating, and I think this bl...

If you have watched a crime procedural program, you have likely heard fictional detectives discussing "profiles" about their fictional suspects. Like many aspects of entertainment based on real life, suspect profiles have a real-life counterpart. A suspect profile is, to use a metaphor, a running list of features that investigators believe an anonymous suspect likely possesses. Suspect profiles consist of features ascertained from evidence like witness statements and physical clues. Even psychological analysis can be used to build a profile. Likewise, when the evidence is available, suspect profiles may also be informed by linguistic data. In the same way that a profile picture in not a complete picture of a person, a suspect profile is not a complete description. Even a well-informed suspect profile may still lack a name, but, like that profile picture, it may contain just enough information about a person that you could recognize them from someone else. The crook of the...

This is my "thesis semester." Honestly, it's intimidating. A lot of my future hangs on the success of my thesis. If I finish a good seventy pages or so, I can graduate with my MA in Forensic Linguistics. If it is particularly successful, I could publish it and break into the field quite a bit. The topic of my thesis is Native Language Identification as a tool in suspect profiling. Some research on Native Language Identification (NLID) has already been conducted. That research supports the theory that one can deduce a person's first language based on the kinds of "mistakes" they make in their second language. My thesis is about the applications of NLID toward building suspect profiles. Ultimately, my goal is to expand on research in Native Language Identification so that it is more reliably used in cases to implicate or exonerate appropriate suspects. This would have considerable value in cases of terrorist communications and many types of international c...