Modern Methods of Text Attribution in the Anglo-Saxon Practice of Authorship Identification

Abstract

As our society moves further into the age of digital document production, more issues will arise as to textual and non-textual infringement of copyright. The author of this article, which is dedicated to authorship attribution in the forensic context, believes that it is necessary to situate the very idea of author, which involves a number of archetypal images, with novelist being the most notable one. The populist conception of the author stems from the romantic period and seems to have changed little from that time. Apparent success of current author matching methods (such as the High Frequency Lexicon test, different computational methods) hides a number of defects because the author’s space is a public one and prone to occupation by other genre authors. Authors can either identify their work with the works of prominent same-genre authors, or stand in opposition to particular members of the genre group. Authors themselves can demonstrate inconsistency in their idiolects under the influence of social changes. Genre is viewed as a cognitive schema with underlying linguistic, sociological, and psychological assumptions. The boundaries between genres can be fluid with cross-genres or hybrid genres emerging as a result. Both the homogenizing nature of genre and individualistic features of the author style yield to the inevitable forces of social and personal entropy (decay) and ectropy (growth).

References

1. Arapova M.A. 2019. Rechevoi portret kak vazhnyi ehlement formirovaniya kinoobraza sovremennogo uchenogo [Speech portrait as an important element that helps to create the image of a scientist in the contemporary TV series]. Moscow State University Bulletin. Series 19: Linguistics and Intercultural Communication, no. 2, pp. 156–163. (In Russ.)

2. Krassa S.I. 2013. Metodika i instrumentarii atributsii teksta v avtorovedcheskoi ehkspertize [Methodology and tools of text attribution in forensic linguistics]. Al’manakh sovremennoi nauki i obrazovaniya. Vol. 10, pp. 106–108. (In Russ.)

3. Kennedy M. 2006. The day Dan Brown struggled to follow the high court plot. Guardian. URL: https://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/mar/14/books.danbrown (accessed:25.02.2020).

4. Olsson J., Luchjenbroers J. 2014. Forensic linguistics. Bloomsburry Academic Publishing, pp. 13–47.