Sociolinguistic Artifacts

Article about the use of what the author calls linguistic profiling, although it is not quite the same as John Baugh's use of the term, to narrow down suspects for a crime. I had some concerns about the ideas, partly because it seemed like it was over-generalizing or treating certain groups as the default (for instance, it stuck out to me that at one point it was automatically assumed that the writer of a note must have been male because there were no features specifically treated as female, like hedging, but there were also other instances of this), and partly because a lot of the ideas they're relying on go against what we've talked about with the issues in directly linking a linguistic feature to a specific group. I also have some concerns about the ethics of trying to do this at all, given the prevalence of linguistic discrimination, and how unequivocally positively the article talks about it. [Published on 12-31-1969]