1. Presented By: Marine Milad, Ph.D.
E303B: English Grammar in Context Unit 22: Using Grammar to Establish the Facts
Presented By:
Marine Milad, Ph.D.

2. Introduction
The aim of book 5 is to provide more contexts for you to extend your knowledge of grammar and grammatical analysis other than the 4 registers introduced in the other books.
Book 5 demonstrates how the grammatical principles learned so far can be applied in other contexts especially in areas of professional life. The main professions selected are:
Law
Translation and interpreting
Lexicography (Dictionaries)
Education

3. Introduction
In each of these areas, corpus linguistics contributes to the discovery of patterns of language difficult to trance in a large number of authentic texts without this technological development.
This last book of the course aims at stimulating your enthusiasm for grammatical analysis of practical uses of grammar in real-world contexts.
The aim of unit 22 is to focus on the origins of written texts and the accuracy and comprehensiveness of any transcript of spoken language, whether genuine or fake.
This information is important in establishing the authorship of texts- from disputed manuscripts to student essays- and the authenticity of statements, especially legal testimonies.

4. Introduction We have studied before
different ways of representing direct and indirect speech in writing.
different types of process verbs that may be used to introduce a projected clause.
Different English registers that differ lexicogrammatically.

5. Objectives: By the end of this unit you will :
Decide if a particular text is genuinely what it supports to be (the authenticity of statements).
Decide whether a particular text can be attributed to a particular author(authorship of the texts).
Identify lexical and grammatical choices that distinct an individual (authorship of the texts).

6. 1. Naturally Occurring and Scripted Dialogue
Do Activity 1, pp (Authentic vs. scripted)
Read the eight dialogues and decide which one is
Impossible to be a record of an actual conversation
Unlikely to be a record of an actual conversation
Possible to be a record of an actual conversation (still some features make it suspicious)
Probable to be a record of an actual conversation (though one can never be certain)
See comments section, pp

7. 2. Who Said What? ‘Authorship studies'
Authorship studies or authorship identification includes forensic stylistics and literary stylistics.
They establish whether a particular text (testimony transcript, novel, poem, etc.) was written by a particular person.
This is done by subjecting texts to linguistic analysis procedures, then comparing against other texts already known by the author in question.
The level of (dis)similarity would then be the basis for some kind of judgment.
They use clues of all levels, e.g. accent, spelling, punctuation, textual cohesion, grammar and lexis.

8. 2. Who Said What? ‘Forensic studies‘
They are related to law in order to interpret the intended meaning in statements and documents, and to trace inconsistencies in language use.
The purpose is to see how far police intervened in writing the transcripts of witness/suspects’ testimony; for example, to trace whether witness responses follow up from the previous questions and see if they agree with the questions (evidence from textual cohesion).
Moreover, evidence from lexical choices are found in the use of specialized lexis with overly precise dates, times and places coming out from an illiterate poorly educated 17 year-old in addition to grammar evidence like the frequent use of the passive voice in speech and other grammatical choices not typical of the spoken language.

9. 2.1 Evidence from grammatical cohesion
It is important in disputed legal statements to establish whether a statement has genuinely occurred and who is likely to have said it and in what sequence they said it.
Activity 2, pp.19 (The Bridgewater four case)
Text cohesion
Question/answer sequence
Questions lack agreement with responses (responses do not follow from questions.
This is evidence that questions are overlaid by police on an original monologue in order to make their line of questioning appear more gentle that it had in fact been, which is evidence of police malpractice.

10. 2.2 Evidence from lexical choices
(The Derek Bentley case) read the written statement.
Are there any lexical items or phrases that seem unlikely to have come from a mouth of a poorly educated and functionally illiterate 17-year-old?
Use of some grammatical choices e.g. the proposition towards rather than at, use of simple past walked rather than were walking, passive voice and irregular word order ‘we were stopped by our parents going out together’.
Use of specialized vocabulary marked for a poorly educated illiterate 17-year-old e.g. shelter arrangement, brickwork entrance to the door, plain clothes, policeman in uniform, the place is surrounded.

11. 2.2 Evidence from lexical choices
(The Derek Bentley case) read the written statement.
Activity 5, pp. 23, table (1) & figure (1)
Overly precise; precision of dates, times, places which is implausible in an unprompted/spontaneous account.
A concordancer word frequency search of the 10 most frequent words in the statement. Language was found typical of police language e.g. then (frequency and word order).
Coulthard (1998) concluded that the frequency of the word ‘then’ is unusual in ordinary witness statements, but very typical of written police reports.

12. 2.3 Grammatical evidence revisited
(The Derek Bentley case) read the written statement.
His statement “I did not know he was going to use the gun” shows that he must have known that his friend Chris had a gun.
Later, he claimed “I did not have a gun and I did not know Chris had one until he shot”.
Use of the definite article ‘the’ then later use indefinite article ‘a’ is an evidence of self-contradiction, thus marked him as an unreliable witness.

13. 2.3 Grammatical evidence revisited
(The Derek Bentley case) read the written statement.
Thus, his statement had been elicited by question and answer and therefore was not, as the police had claimed, the product of monologue dictation.
The purpose is to establish who said what; to make use of lexical and grammatical clues to distinguish authentic speech from its scripted equivalent to help judges and jury to reach a more reliable verdict.
They could present evidence of police malpractice.

14. 3. Who Wrote What? 3.1 Is there such a thing as a ‘linguistic fingerprint’
It is the unique style of each person which remains constant across text types.
Forensic linguistics bases its analysis of written language on fingerprint e.g. evidence like handwriting, spelling, morphology, syntax and punctuation. It takes into account:
Presence of a feature e.g. sentence breaks, varied sentence openings.
Absence of a feature e.g. preposition deletion
Word count and frequency of certain expressions and lexical choice
Position and distribution across different texts by the same author
Lexical variety

15. 3. Who Wrote What? 3.1 Is there such a thing as a ‘linguistic fingerprint’
Linguistic fingerprint and disputed written texts, e.g. farewell letter of a wife leaving her family on the basis of evidence from spelling, morphology, syntax and punctuation.
'Eagleson(1994) farewell letter case (sophisticated marked and varied sentence openers) e.g. upon arriving home my husband ………….
Unabomber case (collocations and unique personal style)

16. 3. Who Wrote What? 3.1 Is there such a thing as a ‘linguistic fingerprint’
Grant and Baker (2004) have argued that there are two major reasons for using several variables in combination to discriminate between authors:
1. the more discriminants one has, the more successful discrimination becomes.
2. several variables may be combined in different ways to produce new.
However, they rejected the notion of a unique and transferable ‘linguistic fingerprint’ which remains constant across text types.
Activity 7, pp. 27 is home assignment.

17. 3. Who Wrote What? 3.1 Is there such a thing as a ‘linguistic fingerprint’
Answer the three questions on page 28.
“Hapax legomena” related to type-token ratio, denotes words that occur once in a text.
Thus, showing lexical richness that relates to the imbalance between lexical and function words.
The larger the text under study, the smaller the proportion of grammatical words which are used once only.
Academic introductions are conventionally full of references to earlier work.
There is a stronger personal voice in the conclusion where the author interprets the findings or draw together the threads of argument in an authoritative way.
The final question here is whose voice gets into print the authors or the editors.

18. 3. Who Wrote What? 3.2 Is there such a thing as a ‘literary signature’
Literary signature and Stylometry (stylometrics or computational stylistics) are used in the study of unattributed texts.
Stylometry (stylometrics or computational stylistics) uses statistics and computerized analysis of texts to identify texts whose authorship is in dispute (a quantitative approach).
Analysts look at letter sequence (lexical string), lexical choices and grammatical structures favored by a writer.
They use the computer to identify, count and trace frequencies.
Case of Thomas Middleton, a contemporary of Shakespeare.
Activity 8, pp. 30 is home assignment.

19. 4. Plagiarism in Academic Texts
Plagiarism is unattributed textual borrowing and the law of copyrights
Lexical bundle refers to the fact that all users of a language, whether consciously or unconsciously, echo phrases that they have previously heard or read.
US presidents tend to recycle famous quotations of great thinkers: Alistair Pennycook (p. 32).
Paradoxical situation of ‘putting things in your own words’ vs. ‘you are required to acquire a fixed canon of knowledge and a fixed cannon of terminology to go with it’.
Activity 10, pp. 36.

20. 4. Plagiarism in Academic Texts
Quoting without plagiarizing:
See comments p. 38.
Academic discourse often requires a sophisticated distinction between the writer’s evaluation of facts and the claims and arguments of researchers being discussed.
Mental and verbal processes provide:
Factive statements implying the truth of the following statement e.g. Chomsky discovered…..
Non-factive statements suggesting that the truth of the following statement is questionable e.g. Chomsky supposedly discovered OR Chomsky claimed…..

21. 5. Establishing a Methodology for Authorship Studies
A formula to account for the greater frequency of function words in any text is Lexical choices:
Frequency of individual lexical items.
co-occurrence of favoured lexical items
lexical variety,
hapax legomena (type-token ratio),
Lexical richness.
Grammar is relatively fixed, whereas lexis displays greater variation.
It is the nature of corpus linguistics to search on lexical items.