Detecting Faked Texts
Isabel Picornell and, Malcolm Coulthard · 2022
It is a tenet of sociolinguistics that discourse incorporates linguistic features indicative of the context in which it was produced. It is this influence of contextual features on language choices that often enables forensic linguists to identify faked texts—as authors are largely unaware of the linguistic clues their texts include. This chapter looks at a real case of fraudulent misrepresentation and how the fabrication of context impacts on the language of the text. Following an introduction to the case, the core linguistic principles applied to the analysis are outlined and discussed. Extracts from the case material are used to demonstrate how violations of these linguistic principles may be recognized and what conclusions may be drawn from them. Although the cooperative principle and Gricean maxims analyze communication from the speaker's perspective, relevance theory looks at communication from the addressee's perspective.