Forensic Linguistics
Solving crimes with
linguistics sounds sort of crazy, doesn't it? But wait, that's what my
alter-ego's first mystery revolves around! Tace Baker's Speaking of Murder came out from Barking
Rain Press on September 18. It features a Quaker linguistics professor
who...well, let's just quote her web site:
"The
murder of a talented student at a small New England college thrusts linguistics
professor Lauren Rousseau into the search for the killer. Lauren is a
determined Quaker with an ear for accents. Her investigation exposes small town
intrigues, academic blackmail and a clandestine drug cartel that now has its
sights set on her."
A New Yorker article from a
couple of months ago called “Words on Trial” described the current state of
forensic linguistics. I knew about the field from prior research, but it was
cool to be reminded of how linguists can solve crimes by analyzing consistent
patterns in text messages, voice mail message, or written notes.
For example, the article describes how Professor Robert Leonard matched certain elements in the emails of an accused murderer with the text scrawled on the wall at the murder scene. Things like using "U" for "you," which is commonly seen in text messages but not in emails, and misplaced apostrophes in words like "doesnt'" and "cant'." This case had no physical evidence, and the accused was condemned to three life terms in prison based on the forensic linguistic evidence.
The article gave me more than one idea
for Book Three in Tace Baker's Speaking of Mystery series. In Speaking of Murder, Lauren Rousseau uses
spoken accents, both domestic and foreign, to identify and eliminate suspects.
But she's fully capable of doing text analysis or of determining, as Leonard
did, that the suspect used contractions only in negative statement ("I
can't") but not in positive ones ("I am"), evidence that
resulted in conviction.
Have you read mysteries solved by a
linguist or investigator with linguistic prowess? Or heard of crimes with
language-related evidence?
Comments
Carole Shmurak
in 2012 I wrote my first mystery novel called "Poetic Justice" in which
a computer program is used to determine the author of several mysterious
books and manuscripts. (in 2012 I was unaware that Carolyn Heilbrun,
writing under the pseudonym Amanda Cross, also wrote a mystery called
"Poetic Justice" which has no forensic linguistics, but which does have
a first-hand, insiders view of the Columbia student riots of April 1968).
I'm a computational linguist by training, so this plot device came rather naturally.
and I guess forensic linguistics was very much in the air in 2012
or great minds think alike.
since you posted this, J.K.Rowling published under a psuedonym, and forensic
linguistics were part of the evidence used to uncover this, (although some
smelled a publicity stunt) - see article "How Computer Analysis Uncovered J. K. Rowling's Secret Novel" from the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).
cheers,
Mitzi