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Joined: 07 Feb 2010
Posts: 1
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 Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 6:05 pm
Post subject: An out-of-the-ordinary request |
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Greetings, all! First time poster...
I am preparing a human interest article covering events related to the hacking incident at the UEA Climate Research Unit last November.
An acquaintance of mine was one of the original recipients of the stolen data. Attached was this three sentence message:
We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.
We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.
My instincts tell me that there may be some useful linguistic/semantic information with regards to the background, education and nationality of the writer.
I would be grateful if forum participants could give the above some thought and offer any comments they may have. And, I will include credit in the article when/if it is published.
Looking forward to your comments!
Ian |
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Joined: 17 Oct 2007
Posts: 681
Location: New Brunswick, NJ |
Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 9:03 am
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| I don't know that you can get much information about the writer from a passage this short and stylized. In a message like this the author isn't very likely to use dialectal expressions or personal idiosyncrasies; the language is quite formal and based on standard expressions ("We hereby release..."). I would guess that the writer is a native English speaker based on "under wraps", since a non-native speaker is unlikely to know that idiom. Depending on the distribution of "under wraps" (more American, more British, etc.) you might be able to hazard a guess at the writer's nationality. However, it is also likely that the message was composed and edited by several people before being sent out. |
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