Abstract

Linguists dealing with forensic authorship analysis have to take into consideration that anonymous authors of incriminated writings may attempt to disguise their language behaviour. Although this issue has been referred to several times in research literature, there is still a lack of empirical data on the strategies of disguise. The following article presents the results of an experimental study focusing on such strategies as observed with linguistically untrained speakers for the purpose of concealing their authorship. It turns out that in most cases the attempts of disguise fail and the authors can be identified.