Theoretical and Methodological Problems of Defining the ‘idiolect’

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Although the idiolect cannot be looked upon as an absolute and unique identity marker like the fingerprint, it can reveal relative and distinctive features of an individual’s style in their use of language. These relative and distinctive features might suggest authorship of a text when texts and authors are compared, at least if there is a decent amount of textual data available. So instead of claiming that the idiolect gives absolute and reliable answers we should be open to, and conscious of, the possible deviations, and use it as a tool only to suggest authorship and be very careful not to lean on it to find absolute answers. If used wisely the idiolect can be very helpful in criminal cases, like in the case of JonBenét Ramsay, where the parents at first were suspects, but after tedious qualitative and quantitative analysis, partly using the notion of the idiolect as a tool, the evidence showed that the parents’ idiolects did not match that of the ransom letter, and therefore suggested that they were innocent.

To sum up what I have discovered writing this assignment, I have found that there are no theories or methods available today that can determine an individual’s idiolect with the accuracy and reliability that is required to use the idiolect as a tool to safely identify the authorship of texts. That does not mean that the notion of the idiolect is without value, as it can be used in authorship comparison, rather than authorship identification, to suggest attribution of authorship, not as an absolute answer, but as an indication of the text’s authorship. This might in many cases be enough to help the investigation of crime cases, not as only evidence, but to give weight to already existing evidence.

Bibliography:

Olsson, John. 2008. Forensic Linguistics. Second Edition. Continuum International Publishing Group. London.

Crankshaw, Rebecca. 2010. The validity of the Linguistic Fingerprint in forensic investigation, online article. March 2013.

http://atp.uclan.ac.uk/buddypress/diffusion/?p=1228