[bborud]

In forensic linguistics you typically measure a lot of metrics, not just word frequencies, use of punctuation and whitespace, sentence lengths and structures etc. Attribution also isn't the only use of forensic linguistics. You can also look at influences, deas, people, publications etc. For instance in order to infer something about the reader, analyze influence networks etc.

I got interested in forensic linguistics many years ago when an article in a somewhat shady publication mentioned me. I got curious and started reading anything I could find on the topic. I was eventually able to identify the author, but mostly by tricking him to admit it after I had a ranked list of candidates. He was second on a list of about 4-5 people (out of a candidate set of perhaps 300). Not half bad for the rather crude methods I used. I was rather pleased with myself.

I've used similar techniques later to look at influence networks in companies.