Tanya Karoli Christensen taught linguistics at LSA

Tanya Karoli Christensen has spent the summer teaching forensic linguistics at the LSA Linguistic Institute in Lexington, Kentucky.

The course was co-taught with Professor Robert Leonard, Hofstra University, NY, and attracted students from all over the world.

The main topics were Language crimes (how crimes can be committed solely through the use of language, such as defamation or solicitation of murder), Linguistic profiling (how linguistic features can point to a speaker or writer’s demographic background) and Authorship analysis (how similar language patterns can tie different texts together and support a hypothesis of common authorship).

Students were very enthusiastic and described the course as their favourite among the LSA courses this year.