A combined linguistic and authorship examination is needed when authorship must be examined alongside meaning, verbal influence, threats, evaluative language, reputation-related features or the text's communicative purpose.
What you can do
- collect the disputed text and its context;
- select comparable samples from the presumed author;
- formulate appropriate questions for the expert;
- prepare a specialist opinion or an expert report review.
How to separate the tasks in a combined examination
The question of what a statement means concerns analysis of its content. The question of who created a text requires examination of written language and suitable comparison samples. These tasks can be combined, but the report must show which observations and methods were used for each.
For example, a shared subject and the same position in two publications do not prove common authorship. Linguistic habits are examined separately to test that hypothesis; the analysis then checks whether the similarity can be explained by quotation, editing or common circumstances in which the texts were created.
What to check in the source materials
- Whether original remarks are distinguished from forwarded and borrowed material.
- Whether errors and presentation features have been preserved without correction by a proofreader.
- Whether the origin of each comparison text is known.
- Whether a user account has been treated as an identified author in advance.
The overall finding must retain the limitations of each discipline. Insufficient material for authorship comparison cannot be compensated for by a confident interpretation of the message's meaning.
On this subject: Can the author of a short message be identified.