Speech Masking of Authorship in Conflict-Prone Texts: Linguistic, Legal and Psychological Aspects

Abstract

The article introduces a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to authorship speech masking identification and classification as a research domain of the linguistics of lies. The material for the study was a corpus of conflict-prone texts, which, among other things, contained deliberately falsified information about the author. The paper discloses the issues of conflict-prone texts authorship investigation. It presents the description of the main types of speech masking and linguistic ways of their expression. The legal aspects of the concept are revealed, in particular, the description of crimes is given, the compositions of which may include a speech masking of authorship. Some features of the subjective side of the offense (intent, motive) are studied, thus it enables qualifying the speech behavior of a person as a disguise. The psychological aspect of speech masking in the author’s text is highlighted, trends in psychological influence orientation in the context of various types of its implementation are noted. The comprehensive study resulted in the establishment and description of the types of authorship masking. Based on the study of the text array, the linguistic and psychological characteristics of each of the diagnosed types of disguise were identified in terms of legislative norms and relevant law enforcement practice.

Keywords

• linguistics of lies
• conflict-prone text
• speech masking
• idiostyle
• imitation of authorship
• denotation encoding