Stylistics

WHAT IS STYLISTICS?

Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. As a discipline it links literary criticism and linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own. The preferred object of stylistic studies is literature, but not exclusively "high literature" but also other forms of written texts such as text from the domains of advertising, pop culture, politics or religion. Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as socialisation, the production and reception of meaning, critical discourse analysis and literary criticism.

Other features of stylistics include the use of dialogue, including regional accents and people’s dialects, descriptive language, the use of grammar, such as the active voice or passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of particular language registers, etc. In addition, stylistics is a distinctive term that may be used to determine the connections between the form and effects within a particular variety of language. Therefore, stylistics looks at what is ‘going on’ within the language; what the linguistic associations are that the style of language reveals.

WHAT IS COMPUTATIONAL STYLISTICS?

Stylistic analysis, the study of patterns formed in the process of the linguistic encoding of information, is of importance to any major research focused upon or dependent upon the production or analysis of language. Through the use of computers, it should be possible to achieve more accurate detection and delineation of such linguistic patterns than has hitherto been the case; a quantitatively rigorous and intense study of pattern or style in natural language called computational stylistics. Computational stylistics has immediate, practical implications for work in areas ranging from machine translation and automatic abstracting to the social sciences and humanities. For adequate machine translations and automatic abstracts, algorithms of normative style for the textual genre being translated or abstracted must be available; the use of the computer for stylistic analysis will help make possible the recognition and specification of such algorithms. Stylistic analysis is also integral to the detection of idiosyncratic uses of language which distinguish one author from another. An author's style is his signature. Through analysis of individual style, researchers can find clues to unique characteristics in linguistic pattern.

 

FORENSIC LINGUISTICS

 

Forensic linguistics, legal linguistics, or language and the law, is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics. There are principally three areas of application for linguists working in forensic contexts - understanding language of the written law, understanding language use in forensic and judicial processes and the provision of linguistic evidence. The discipline of forensic linguistics is not homogenous; it involves a range of experts and researchers in different areas of the field. Among the text types include emergency call, ransom demands orother threat communication, suicide letters, death row statements etc.

Forensic linguists are involved in many areas that relate to crime, both solving crime and absolving people wrongly accused of committing crimes.  Some of these areas of research and expertise include:

• voice identification (for instance, determining whether the voice on a threatening tape recording was that of the defendant; sometimes also called forensic phonetics)

• author identification (determining who wrote a particular text by comparing it to known writing samples of a suspect; sometimes also called forensic stylistics)

• discourse analysis (analyzing the structure of a writing or spoken utterance, often coverly recorded, to help determine issues such as who is introducing topics or whether a suspect is agreeing to engage in a criminal conspiracy)

• linguistic proficiency (did a suspect understand the Miranda warning or police caution?)

• dialectology (determining which dialect of a language a person speaks, usually to show that a defendant has a different dialect from that on an incriminating tape recording.  As opposed to voice identification, which analyzes the acoustic qualities of the voice, dialectology uses linguistic features to accomplish similar goals)

• "linguistic origin analysis" (this is my term for the process of trying to determine what a person's native language is, often for purposes of granting or denying applications for political asylum.  A more common term is "language analysis," but that term is overly broad, it seems to me.  Note that linguistic origin analysis is very similar to what we might call forensic dialectology)

• "linguistic veracity analysis" (again, I think I may have invented this term, but it refers to various linguistically-inspired methods for determining whether a speaker or writer was being truthful)