The Legal Profession, Forensic Linguistics, and Genre

A distinction is made between genre and the law in general and genre in forensic linguistics in particular. It is shown that controlling for genre is a necessary condition for non-traditional authorship attribution results to be admitted into evidence in a court of law. Systemic Functional Linguistics is discussed. The search for cross-genre attribution techniques is reported in depth. Examples of genre in court cases are given. The concept of word embeddings is discussed. Koppel, Argamon, and Schler reported 33 “potential pitfalls” of employing non-traditional techniques in forensic linguistics – ten of them are listed. The point is made that cross-genre techniques in non-traditional authorship attribution do not work.