Amu Bill,
Exactly that is our research problem. A very good point. I have been trying to tackle this problem for a long time to no avail. Let's put a small part of my research question here so everyone understands what is all about. Please do not share this with our competing universities

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"Hard sciences are not the only methods which have been used by forensic scientists. As a soft science, psychological profiling has been systematically developed and applied in the USA to help law enforcement officers to catch criminals by investigating the crime scenes and establishing psychological profiles and thus narrowing down the pool of suspects (Douglas & Olshaker, 1995). The analysis of the language has also been an accepted method in police investigations. In an empirical research, 300 people were asked to write short texts about asking a cashier to hand over the money and these texts were analyzed subsequently. There were not even two texts which showed similarities in contents (Steinke, 1990a:324). This offers a promising way for forensic linguistic evidence.
There are lots of criticisms of forensic linguistics (especially in the field of analyzing written texts); however, one should be careful in criticizing this field. We cannot say that this field is useless. As we have seen above, other fields of forensic investigations are neither perfect nor complete. They also have to go through major improvements and changes. In addition, they are controversial, too. On the other hand, criticisms help forensic linguists to be more careful in their analyses and to find better ways of improving their methods. But, it doesn't mean that they should stop working in this field altogether. In criticizing forensic linguistics, one should not ask whether "forensic linguistic text analysis" is possible and hence it could be used as evidence in the courtroom (Kniffka, 1992:191). This is an overgeneralization. One has to differentiate between different cases. As Kniffka (1996:27) puts it forensic linguistics is neither "all nonsense, as one general linguistics colleague flatly stated, nor is it a magic cure. Forensic linguistics is not "armchair" linguistics. It has to analyze real-world cases and try to get hand-on experience from them. One can learn forensic linguistic text analysis only by doing it (Kniffka, 1992:192). Another important issue of criticism is related to major mistakes and blunders which forensic linguists made in the past. A forensic linguistic text analysis should not be based on one and two certain linguistic features only. One has to apply a holistic approach towards language analysis. Otherwise, we will experience the same blunders which were made in the past. In one case, a forensic linguist found the unusual orthography of "des weiteren" in contrast to the standard "desweiteren" in German as a significant feature for identifying the suspect as the author of an unknown text of a terrorist group. The interesting point is that he made the same mistake in writing his testimony himself. Based on this testimony, the suspect was kept for two years in custody and then a court had to declare the testimony, which was based on the identification of a single linguistic feature, as meaningless and not enough for convicting the suspect (Brückner, 1992:230-271; Wisnewski, Landgraeber and Sieker, 50-9).
This is a good lesson for forensic linguistic analysis. In spite of being a sad and hard lesson, we know now that forensic linguistic text analysis cannot only be based on the identification of a single linguistic feature. All features have to be investigated and be put into correlation with each other. As we will see later, this is one of the tenets of modern forensic linguistic text analysis. FLDD (Forensic Linguistic Differential Diagnosis) is based on an analysis of a conjunction of configurations (Kniffka, 1996:75-123).
Like any other field of applied linguistics, the problem of forensic linguistics is twofold. On the one hand, there are many researchers on the theoretical side who are not really willing to work and cooperate in the real world. However, as Kniffka (1996:28) points out it is much more important to apply linguistic methods for language analysis to real-world problems and offer some help for the people involved and the judiciary than conducting detailed theoretical analyses of sentences and utterances, involving enormous scientific efforts in a seminar in the "ivory tower". On the other hand, there are many so-called experts of language who don't have any theoretical background in linguistics and work in practice (Grewendorf, 1990:247). These people have done a big disservice to forensic linguistics as a scientific field. In an applied field, we cannot do without solid theoretical concepts and methodology and at the same time as Kniffka (1990b:484) puts it we cannot rely on "heuristic casuistry" by applying our common sense to analyze written texts. Both methods, namely theoretical and applied linguistics have to be combined with each other and make up a solid framework for forensic linguistic text analysis.
The other problem of forensic linguistic methods is that these methods are only able to make probabilistic judgments and therefore are criticized by some lawyers who are used to their deterministic statements based on the "yes-no" questions (Gibbons, 1994:323). The concept of probability in stylistic analysis is very important since according to Dolezel (1969:10), the foundations of the statistical theory of style can be summarized in a simple statement: style is a probabilistic concept. However, making a case for deterministic statements only is not realistic since many legal judgments are made "on the balance of the probabilities" (Gibbons, 1994:323). On the other hand, it is important to take into consideration that the judicial notion of probability is polycriterial and not only restricted to the single criterion of mathematical (Pascallian) probability (McMenamin, 1993:51). Miron (1981:406) also emphasizes that the determination of a common source for two or more communications must be probabilistic in nature since the speech and writing of the same individual might differ from one occasion to another."
Besides, as McMenamin (1993:50) points out evidence from stylistics is demonstrative (real) in two ways: first, written language can speak for itself and second analysis of these documents can be represented in summaries, charts and diagrams. Evidence of writing style is regarded as substantial and thus having probative force and legal significance. However, it is important to take into consideration that in spite of having strong substantive value in some cases, stylistic evidence can never have absolute probative value (McMenamin, 1993:51). We have also to be aware of the fact that stylistic evidence could serve as circumstantial evidence and not as a direct evidence. The difference between these two types of evidence is that direct evidence gives the investigators clear direction and focus relevant to some event or action, such as a latent finger print, whereas the circumstantial evidence offers direction but lacks distinct focus (Bevel and Ross, 1997:21).
For our website in UK go to:
http://www.builder.bham.ac.uk/forensiclinguistics/welcome.asp
for consulting firms operating in this field see:
http://www.thetext.co.uk
for seeking terrorists using anthrax see:
http://www.thetext.co.uk/anthrax.pdf
for a link of lists see:
http://wwwscience.murdoch.edu.au/teaching/m235/forensiclinguistics.htm
for a related field forensic semiotics see:
http://www.cyberprofessional.com/lingo
I hope I could clarify a little. We forensic linguists are only good guys and I have a double dgree one in Business Administration and one in English Linguistics. The first one I use for my job in banking industry and the second I am trying to get my PhD in. Hope this helps my friends.
Regards,
Manoucher
