BEST PRACTICES 347
Another aspect of linguistic theory essential to author
identification is the theory of markedness.^40 In many human
characteristics, there is an asymmetry in function of symmetrical
design. Handedness and footedness are the obvious examples of
this asymmetry, but the brain also has this kind of duality.^41
Language is permeated from phonetics through pragmatics with
asymmetric oppositions, a fact that was first realized and
articulated by the Prague School in the 1940s and then adopted
within generative linguistics in phonology^42 and in syntax.^43
Markedness explains why some noun phrase structures are
harder to process, produce, or find in high frequency while
other nouns phrase structures are a dime a dozen, even in child
language.^44 A noun phrase “the tippy cup with your name on it
that we found under the car seat yesterday” is marked; the noun
phrase “your tippy cup” is unmarked. Marked noun structures
occur later in language acquisition and even in adult language
are less frequent than unmarked noun structures.
In phonetics, normalization is the process of speaker
recognition by which we come to recognize specific phonetic
features in an individual’s voice—features that are consistent
with the person but also different from someone else.^45 If
recognition is possible at the phonetic level—and everyone has
had the experience of recognizing a person by voice over the
telephone—it is a testable hypothesis that a similar
(^40) For an overview of markedness theory in linguistics, see generally
EDWIN L. BATTISTELLA, MARKEDNESS: THE EVALUATIVE STRUCTURE OF
LANGUAGE (1990).
(^41) Kenneth Hugdahl, Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Human Brain, 13
EUR. REV. 119, 119–33 (2005).
(^42) See NOAM CHOMSKY & MORISS HALLE, THE SOUND PATTERN OF
ENGLISH (1968).
(^43) Judith Aissen, Markedness and Subject Choice in Optimality Theory,
17 NAT. LANGUAGE & LINGUISTIC THEORY 673, 673–711 (1999); see also
GERALD GAZDAR ET AL., GENERALIZED PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR
(1985); CARL POLLARD & IAN A. SAG, HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE
GRAMMAR (1994).
(^44) See BATTISTELLA, supra note 40.
(^45) For an overview of speaker recognition, see Homayoon Beigi, Speaker
Recognition, in BIOMETRICS 3, 3–29 (2011), available at http://www.intech
open.com/books/biometrics/speaker-recognition.