Abstract

This paper is a state of the art report of forensic linguistic anonymous authorship analysis (FLA) of authentic extortion and threatening letters. lt summarizes briefly some theoretical, methodological and empircal aspects of forensic linguistic expert testimony given by the author in the last thirty years. The focus is ( l) on the range of variation of requests of linguistic expert opinion in real life; (2) the nature and methodological implications of data of verbal behavior relevant for FLA; (3) a perspective on a contrastive analysis oftext types in FLA; (4) an exemplaric illustration of feature configuration analysis of speaker specific behavior and its impact for FLA.