Function words as possible style markers: an application to the forensic authorship analysis of Getúlio Vargas' suicide note (carta-testamento)

In August 1954, the then President of Brazil Getúlio Vargas took his own life with a shot to the heart. A suicide note was found next to his body stating his last will, which became known as the “carta-testamento”. The authorship of the letter, however, was then questioned. People close to the president attributed the authorship of the suicide note to his close friend and speechwriter, José Soares Maciel Filho. Vargas's suicide and his last letter changed the course of Brazilian history. Hence, his suicide note is worth analysing from the perspective of forensic authorship analysis, by focusing specifically on function words. The corpus used in this analysis includes also other texts written by Getúlio Vargas and Maciel Filho. The findings, part of a larger research project, show that there are significant differences between the “carta-testamento” and the other suicide notes written by Vargas. The findings also suggest that the use of certain words is linked more to the relationship between the speaker and addressee than to the genre and topic.

Keywords:
forensic linguistics ; suicide notes ; idiolect ; Getúlio Vargas