Cases of disputed authorship are common in a wide variety of contexts – from famous literary and historical mysteries, to forensic investigations into murder and terrorism, to current scandals involving politicians and entertainers. Although these problems are usually solved through the analysis of external evidence, the texts themselves can provide important clues of authorship. In this module, we will learn about linguistic approaches to the analysis of disputed authorship, including the application of methods borrowed from stylistics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. Students will have a chance to work with data from real cases and will be required to complete an authorship analysis research project of their own design.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
demonstrate an understanding of the history and context of linguistic approaches to authorship analysis
demonstrate an understanding of the differences between various types of authorship analysis problems
apply a range of qualitative and quantitative methods for authorship analysis
design and conduct an authorship analysis research project of their own design