Authorship analysis of three Jordanian columnists: is there a linguistic fingerprint?

This forensic linguistic study aims to explore some style markers of three prominent Jordanian columnists. The study examined five semantic, three syntactic, and five structural style features in 75 genre-controlled Arabic newspaper articles. In this investigation, we followed stylistic (qualitative) and stylometric (quantitative) approaches to determine the linguistic style of the three targeted authors and their writing fingerprints. Findings revealed many distinctive style markers among the three authors, such as adopting unique bags of words and employing different word order choices. Moreover, the present study demonstrated that different linguistic styles could be associated with various personality traits, varied demographic backgrounds, and other emotional and psychological states of the authors. This work contributes to the general research on authorship attribution and profiling. It identified authors’ numerical profiles of style markers to assist experts in attributing unidentified texts to their most likely author. The research findings contribute to the field and hold promise for the future, potentially leading to the development of forensic software packages for authorship identification and solving authorship issues such as plagiarism detection.