The Morbid Linguist

The Nursery Note One of the most famous kidnapping cases in American history is that of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The child’s father and namesake was Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator. Lindbergh, Sr. had completed his record-breaking transatlantic flight in 1927, and he was still a prominent celebrity when his 20-month-old son was kidnapped from his nursery on the night of March 1, 1932. The infant was not recovered until May 12, 1932, when his body was discovered near the Lindbergh home. Investigators determined that he likely died shortly after he was taken.  Between the night of March 1 and when ransom is delivered on April 2, 1932, the abductors delivered a total of 15 notes . In September 1934, a German immigrant was seen spending one of the gold certificates used to pay the ransom and was soon arrested. He was convicted and executed in 1936.  Mark Falzini , the archivist of the New Jersey State Police Museum in possession of the notes and other evidence, i...

In my thesis, I hypothesize that forensic linguistic techniques of linguistic demographic profiling can be honed into a method of native language analysis that is supported by quantified language transference data. My previous post explains how I set out to develop Native Language Analysis (NLA) as just such a method, and I strongly suggest you read it first. To summarize, I am essentially expanding on the established techniques of author profiling by incorporating quantified language data to connect interlanguage transference features to the native languages that likely inspired them. As promised, this post is based on the sections of my thesis where I test my hypothetical method by using it to analyze the language evidence from real forensic linguistic cases. One of the languages I catalogued data for was Arabic. The evidence I analyzed comes from the case of Daniel Pearl's abduction. Text of Email 1 Daniel Pearl was a journalist for The Wall Street Journal on assignment...

As I've mentioned before , I am writing my master's thesis on a method of linguistic demographic profiling through analysis of native language transference... a specific method that I am in the process of inventing. Not from whole cloth, of course. The potential method I have developed is an amalgamation of established forensic linguistic techniques and contemporary research in machine-based language processing and computational linguistic analysis. I am calling this method "Native Language Analysis," as my advisor suggested. (I wanted to call it native language  deduction  for the Holmesian connotations, but she said no.) I am designing this proposed method of linguistic demographic profiling specifically for native language diagnosis and supporting it with quantified statistical data. Without getting too deep into sociolinguistic philosophy, the concept central to my research is that - like spoken accents - native speakers of a particular language frequently produ...

Cross-linguistic transfer, native language interference, and interlanguage errors are some of the terms for referring to the concept that users of particular languages have characteristic production patterns when using a second language. Cross-linguistic Influence (CLI) refers to the concept that language learners will rely on experience from their L1 to compensate for weaknesses in their target language. All native language analyses rely on the theories central to CLI: That a person’s L1 is their strongest and so they will rely on that language’s structure to compensate for weaknesses in their L2. When the L1 and L2 have different language structures, the resulting language may contain cross-linguistic transfers. To use a metaphor: Those cross-linguistic transfers are as if a target language’s skin is stretched over the native language’s skeleton. The message may still be understood, but the delivery is unnaturally forced; the degree of unnatural depending on the differences of skin...

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 ...