The Morbid Linguist

There are two types of people: descriptivists and prescriptivists. Especially when it comes to grammar. Most linguists are descriptivists. Your high school grammar teacher was a prescriptivist. A linguistic prescriptivist believes that language use works on a scale of "correct" to "incorrect" based on adherence to a prescribed set of rules. A linguistic descriptivist believes that language users are the writers of those rules, and they are satisfied to describe  the rules those users seem to agree on. I'm going to describe and compare descriptivism and prescriptivism, and it might sound like they're opposing philosophies... but I can't promise that they aren't. In linguistics, the variety of language that most frequently adheres to that language's prescribed rules is called the "standard language." Which variety gets to be the standard depends on each language, country, culture, history, colonialism, and so on. A standard language i...

One of the first things I learned in studying Forensic Linguistics is that I should never say I have "identified" the author or speaker of my language evidence. That advice comes from  a scientist who has investigated several murders . As Dr. Leonard explains it: Even if you have enough evidence to implicate a single suspect, there's still a chance that among the seven billion humans in the world, one of them might happen to use language in the exact same way as your suspect. There's no room for that "scientific certainty" bullshit in his department. The goal of Forensic Linguistic investigation, rather, is to determine the probable creator(s) of language evidence. As an investigator, I would only say, based on the language examined, which suspect(s) I might interpret to be its most likely creator. Maybe even least likely creator, if it's an Authorship Attribution case. All of this hedging - avoidance of certainty or commitment - is intentional. I...

Earlier this week, my thesis fell apart when I discovered a research paper that was about my same topic, and it was done so much better than mine. The researcher even used the same corpus! Regardless of how it ruined my life for a minute, Dr. Penny MacDonald's research  was well-done and illuminating on several great points that I will cite in my final draft. After panicking for a whole day and talking to my advisor, it's clear that my mistake was in proceeding too close to computational linguistics, which I know practically nothing about. I will still write my research about Native Language Identification, essentially, but most work in the topic has been computational. So I've got to take a different approach. Most of the NLID studies use large  corpora of second language-English use and then run algorithms or use machine learning to identify the statistically significant language features that might indicate the authors' first language. These studies are so ...

I realize it's only fair if I explain forensic linguistics, as it is the theme of my blog (and my life, to be honest). My professor, Dr. Rob Leonard, is fond of explaining it like this: "Forensic linguistics is the intersection of language and the law." Instead of describing the entire science, this post is my attempt at explaining where forensic linguistic analysis fits within the legal system. In attempting so, I am writing from my own experience and education. I am an American, and I attend only one of the world's few graduate programs for forensic linguistics. The fact is, criminal cases are only half of forensic linguistics. The other half is civil cases; such as those that concern plagiarism or copyright infringement. Legal documents such as laws, legislation, contracts, and testimony can also require forensic linguistic analysis. The word "forensic" comes from the Latin "forum" and related "forensis"; the latter meaning "o...