What Does Dr. Morton Achieve Meaning?
Morton studied the appeal of Ronald St Germain, by examining some utterances, including a statement written by St Germain, a questionnaire of St Germain, parts of the police officers’ statements accepted by St Germain, and two personnal letters written by St Germain to Morton. He examined forty habits, and twenty-five of them were different. However, this was not consistent enough for Lord Justice Scarman, who said in his judgment that “Dr Morton […] has been unable to advance his conclusions beyond that hypothesis” (blabka)
As a conclusion to this case, Totty, Hardcastle and Pearson claim that the differences found by Morton are certainly real, but does that mean that they have any kind of meaning?
Further studies of the St Germain case …show more content…
There is a statement about events that Smith witnessed, that he wrote himself in June 1981 (they call it statement (A)), a questionnaire, to which he answered verbally in May 1981 (B), and a verbal statement about events where he was defendant, in May 1981 (C). In order to study the stylometry, they took the statement (C) as the disputed statement. For the results to be relevant, the authors needed to take the same numbers of words in statements (A) and (B) than there are in statement (C) (that is 3731 words). They thus divided statement A in three parts and compared the consistency of habits in the three subdivisions of statement (A) and in the whole statement (B). They ended up with 15 consistent habits, that they then compared to the habits in the statement (C). Out of the 15 habits, only 3 of them were significantly …show more content…
They examined 16 habits, and 3 of them were significantly different. Then, they compared both the habits of Smith and St Germain, with the ones of a a third author, Brown. In the Smith-Brown comparison, they ended up with 2 different habits out of the 10 comparable habits. In the St Germain-Brown comparison, they ended up with 3 differences out of 12 comparable habits. These results led the authors in the conclusion that the texts used for stylistic analysis were not able to distinguish one author from another author. They explain this issue by the fact that they had to determine habits that have a high frequency, in order the chi-squared test to be relevant. Moreover, the word position test may not be relevant when it is an other person who writes down and punctuate the verbal speech of
As a conclusion to this case, Totty, Hardcastle and Pearson claim that the differences found by Morton are certainly real, but does that mean that they have any kind of meaning?
Further studies of the St Germain case …show more content…
There is a statement about events that Smith witnessed, that he wrote himself in June 1981 (they call it statement (A)), a questionnaire, to which he answered verbally in May 1981 (B), and a verbal statement about events where he was defendant, in May 1981 (C). In order to study the stylometry, they took the statement (C) as the disputed statement. For the results to be relevant, the authors needed to take the same numbers of words in statements (A) and (B) than there are in statement (C) (that is 3731 words). They thus divided statement A in three parts and compared the consistency of habits in the three subdivisions of statement (A) and in the whole statement (B). They ended up with 15 consistent habits, that they then compared to the habits in the statement (C). Out of the 15 habits, only 3 of them were significantly …show more content…
They examined 16 habits, and 3 of them were significantly different. Then, they compared both the habits of Smith and St Germain, with the ones of a a third author, Brown. In the Smith-Brown comparison, they ended up with 2 different habits out of the 10 comparable habits. In the St Germain-Brown comparison, they ended up with 3 differences out of 12 comparable habits. These results led the authors in the conclusion that the texts used for stylistic analysis were not able to distinguish one author from another author. They explain this issue by the fact that they had to determine habits that have a high frequency, in order the chi-squared test to be relevant. Moreover, the word position test may not be relevant when it is an other person who writes down and punctuate the verbal speech of