Authorship attribution is one of the broadest areas of forensic linguistics. This involves determining who wrote, or more commonly, excluding who wrote a text when authorship is unclear. Linguists assume that each particular choice made by the writer as a whole will allow for identification, because authors are consistent in their choices. Linguists find themselves faced with three main problematic scenarios when attempting to attribute authorship; there is no set of candidates and a profile is required, there are many candidates for a limited sample and verification where it is determined if the suspect is the perpetrator or not. As for whether a communication was written by the suspect or his deceased, we will have to focus on the third scenario. Documents that would give rise to a paternity dispute regarding a deceased person would include wills, last will and testaments, and suicide notes. In the case of a suicide note left behind, the linguist must consider several issues. More importantly, why the deceased committed suicide. Normally it matters little to the linguist why a person commits a crime or does something, but knowing the reasons will help distinguish the genuine from the fake and is almost always the first question asked by the linguists. close ones. To find out why, it helps to know how friends and family feel after an initial loss. The common view is that the person was crazy, a coward, or a loser. This popular view of suicide helps the linguist in that a fake suicide note is more likely to reflect popular attitudes rather than how the person actually feels. One of the main approaches to authorship attribution methodology is the unitary invariant approach that has been developed. by Mendenhall (1887) who sought to distinguish...... middle of paper ......Eds.) Corpus annotation: linguistic information from computer text corpora. Ch.4, p.53-65. London: Longman. Scott, Mike. (1998a). WordSmith Tools. Version 3. Oxford University Press. http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith [Accessed circa 2001.] Grice, HP (1975). “Logic and conversation”. In Cole, P. & Morgan, JL (Eds.) Syntax and Semantics. Vol.3, Speech Acts, p.41-58. New York: Academic Press. [Reprinted in Jaworski, A. & Coupland, N. (Eds.) (2004). The speech reader. p.76-88. London: Routledge.] Coulthard, Malcolm & Johnson, Alison. (2007). “The work of the forensic linguist.” An introduction to forensic linguistics: language in evidence. Ch.6, p.121-143. London and New York: Routledge.H Baayen, H van Halteren and F TweedieOutside the Cave of Shadows: Using Syntactic Annotation to Improve Authorship AttributionLit Linguist Computing 1996 11: 121-132.