I've always imagined the world of Forensic Linguistics to be an exciting one, but it's an area that I've never really had the opportunity to look into in much detail - until now. In doing one of my usual net-trawls for interesting stuff to post on this blog, I came across this article. It reports on the work of researchers at the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, who have been carrying out detailed studies of the language used in hate mail. One of these linguists, Dr Tim Grant, comments in the article on the way in which his team have come to the conclusion that the 57 letters they have been studying could have been written by a woman. They have based this hypothesis on a range of observations about the language used within the letters, much of which conforms to what many linguists consider to be female linguistic traits. Dr Grant's comments contribute significantly to the debates that we've been having in A2 English Language about gender variation :
He said: "One of the things that were striking about the letters was the heavy use of expressive adjectives, which is more typical of women than men. You could say women use more adjectives because they can be more socially evaluative but we don't look at why rather than how the two different groups behave. We just know that's the case because we read a lot of letters and make statistical correlations. The words (in the letters) used were things like 'squalor', 'dirty' and some sexual adjectives which were suggestive of women's writing. Another thing we know is that women tend to use fewer first person pronouns, such as 'I'."This line of argument of course flies in the face of some of the most recent observations on gender variation made by the likes of Deborah Cameron (who argues that the supposed differences between male and female linguistic behaviour are nothing more than myth). It'll be interesting to see if the boffins at Aston Uni turn out to be right...
If you want to find out more about the work of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics, then take a look at their website.
