Psycholinguistics and Threat Prediction: Analyzing Discussion Chapter

Certainly, an incarceration, simple arrest, questioning, or data gathering on individuals such as wire taps would produce a plethora of data that could be used the statistical analysis of potential, real, or existing threats. Some individuals are under surveillance or incarceration for extended periods of time (such as gang leaders, Mafiosi, etc.) and would provide a huge quantity of analyzable data that could be fed to the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCVAC) at Quantico, Virginia. Such data storage and analysis facilities feed data to law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. The Bureau is a major researcher into and user of psycholinguistic analysis and products. While much of law enforcement's criminal investigative analysis was designed for and works best in investigations of serial criminal acts (rapes, homicides, or arsons), a more systematic and scientific methodology of data analysis would allow more specific profiling in the case of individual crime (Smith & Shuy, 2002, p.p. 16-17).

In this milieu, threat simulation theory, options theory, lexical features, phonological features and syntactic features all play a part in the when sociolinguistic features such as geographic origins, ethnicity or race, age, sex, occupation, education level and religious orientation are analyzed. Individual psycholinguistics provides narrower categories where our above theoretical categories can be applied in areas such as threat assessment, authorship identification, false allegations and threats, workplace violence, statement analysis and homicides disguised as suicides. All of this is culled from the analysis of the offender's actual language which will answer our above research questions (ibid, pp. 17-20).

Lexical features can also be analyzed to predict threatening behavior in speech. For instance, it has been found that threatening speech is all researchers agree that a generic slowing can be found in threatening speech (Larsen, Mercer, & Balota, 2006, p. 3). Phonological analysis will help us determine where the threatening person is from, especially in the analysis of regional dialect and accent (Smith & Shuy, 2002p. 17).

Before we go further, some more practical examples for theoretical examples will illustrate practical applications of threat analysis of speech and written communications. For instance, lexical Features, phonological features and syntactic features all figure very largely in police bomb threat analysis. In an article by Robert F. Tunkel, he cites an example of a bomb threat to a high school pep rally:

Studying the language of the threat plays a critical role in the second avenue of analysis, looking for evidence of commitment to the threat by the threatener. Statement analysis involves studying a subject's language, verbal or written, to detect indicators of deception; uncover hidden, disguised meanings or motivations; or discover areas of sensitivity to the subject. The use of first person active tense and unequivocal language signals a good indicator of commitment.The statement, "At the next pep rally, I will throw a homemade pipe bomb filled with black powder after I light the fuse," would carry more weight than "An upcoming pep rally may be disrupted by our group carrying some high explosives, like gunpowder." In the latter example, the subject uses the passive tense "be disrupted" and equivocation in the statement through the qualifiers "may" and "some." This language suggests a lack of commitment on the subject's part (Tunkel, 2002, p. 6).

Threat simulation theory plays a large role in law enforcement threat assessment of a potential criminal. In the Smith and Shuy article cited above "The exact words in spoken or