Authorship Analysis, Social Networks and Catalan. Can we Distinguish X Users by Gender and Age?
Authorship Analysis, Social Networks and Catalan. Can we Distinguish X Users by Gender and Age?

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents data that can help determine whether factors such as gender or age canbecome significant in authorship analysis through X in Catalan. Considering the principles offorensic linguistics (in particular, authorship analysis and idiolectal style), 500 publicationshave been analyzed from a stylistic point of view, focusing on three discursive aspects: specificfeatures of X, pragmatic variables and stylistic variables. Contrary to what some authors havefound for English X users (Cicres, 2015), the paper shows that, in Catalan, emoticons,exclamations or letter multiplication are not distinctive features for gender or age. However,elements such as the concatenation of hashtags, the use of links, the intensification of first-person subject pronouns, the use of capital letters or the use suspension points can bemeaningful for age ⎯but not for gender. This paper thus constitutes a first step towards findingtruly distinctive elements in the use of X in Catalan, even though more studies, with largercorpora, need to be done to confirm these tendencies.

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