I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester. My areas of teaching and research are forensic linguistics, corpus linguistics, register variation and sociolinguistics.
Publications
2023
Nini, A. (2023). A Theory of Linguistic Individuality for Authorship Analysis. Elements in Forensic Linguistics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
2022
Li, H., Dunn, J., Nini, A. (2022). Register variation remains stable across 60 languages. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.
[Published version] [Accepted version]
Donlan, L. & Nini, A. (2022). A forensic authorship analysis of the Ayia Napa rape statement. In Picornell, I., Perkins, R., and Coulthard, M. (eds) Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistics Casework. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
[Accepted version]
2021
Dunn, J. & Nini, A. (2021). Production vs perception: The role of individuality in usage-based grammar induction. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, 149-159, Online: Association for Computational Linguistics.
[Open access]
2020
Nini, A., Bailey, G., Guo, D., Grieve, J. (2020). The graphical representation of phonological dialect features of the North of England on social media. In Honeybone, P. & Maguire, W. (eds), Dialect Writing and the North of England, 266-296, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
[Accepted version]
Fonteyn, L. & Nini, A. (2020). Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the 17th-century gerund alternation. Cognitive Linguistics, 31(2), 279-308.
[Open access]
Talks
2023
Nini, A. ‘A formal model of lexicogrammatical individuality’. 16th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany. 08/2023.
Nini, A. ‘Computational authorship analysis: Towards cognitively realistic methods’. Invited talk at the Digital Humanities PGR Round Table 2023. King’s College London, London, UK. 26/04/2023.
Nini, A. ‘The use of authorship profiling evidence in court’. Invited talk at the MEU Linguistics Society. Mersin University, Mersin, Turkey (online). 26/01/2023.
2022
Nini, A. ‘Forensic authorship analysis and the Dickens Code Project’. Invited talk at the Department of English. University of Buckingham, Buckingham, UK. 23/11/2022.
Nini, A. ‘From Jack the Ripper to cybercrime: linguistics as a forensic science’. Invited talk at the Department of Linguistics Colloquium. University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany. 17/11/2022.
Nini, A. ‘Forensic authorship profiling as court evidence: The Ayia Napa rape statements’. Invited opening talk. VI Jornadas (In)formativas de Lingüística Forense. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain. 20/10/2022.
Nini, A. ‘A theory of linguistic individuality for forensic linguistics’. Invited talk at the Department of Language and Linguistic Science Colloquium. University of York, York, UK. 12/10/2022.
Continue reading “Talks”Software and data sets
The Threatening English Language (TEL) corpus
TEL is the Threatening English Language corpus. It is a collection of 309 written texts compiled from the publicly-available portion of CTARC (the Communicated Threat Assessment Research Corpus, compiled by Tammy Gales), MFT (the Malicious Forensic Texts corpus, compiled by Andrea Nini), and the written portion of CoJO (the Corpus of Judicial Opinions, compiled by Julia Muschalik). Additional texts are from ForensicLing.com (the forensic linguistic data site hosted by Tammy Gales and Dakota Wing). Basic metadata is supplied for each text where known from the original case research.
Continue reading “Software and data sets”Forensic authorship analysis
I offer forensic linguistic consultancy for cases of authorship analysis and I also work on historical cases of disputed authorship.
Authorship analysis is the application of linguistic methods to shed light on the authorship of a questioned text. For instance, it can be used to indicate the most likely author of a text from a sample of suspects or the most likely demographic details of an anonymous author. These techniques are commonly adopted in forensic linguistics to solve cases of disputed authorship, including cases of threatening, abusive, or generally malicious texts.
Most of my research and teaching is dedicated to authorship analysis for forensic linguistics. I regularly apply my research to real-life case work for private clients and law enforcement units and I also work on the application of authorship analysis to historical problems of authorship.
Press and other publications
2021
Cyprus rape case: Police forced British teen to ‘retract’ attack claim, says lawyer
Independent, 17 September [>]
“when we had that statement examined by Dr Andrea Nini, who is an expert forensic linguist based at Manchester University, he said it was highly unlikely the words used in that reaction statement were the words of the teenager.“
Cyprus rape claim case: Lawyer of UK woman appealing conviction hopes for change in handling of cases
inews, 16 September [>]
“The second argument was that the woman’s retraction statement was written in ‘really dodgy English’ and were ‘highly unlikely to be the words of a teenager at the time’, according to an expert witness, forensic linguist Dr Andrea Nini from the University of Manchester.“
Atrapados por la lengua. 50 casos resueltos por la Lingüística Forense by Sheila Queralt Estévez, Larousse, January [>]
“Con su estudio, el doctor Nini probó ni más ni menos que las cartas más antiguas e históricamente importantes para el caso fueron escritas por la misma persona.“
2020
Ayia Napa rape case: The fight for justice
Crime Monthly, May
“Renowned forensic linguist Dr Andrea Nini gave evidence about the retraction Emily says she was forced to write. He tells Crime Monthly ‘Forensic linguistics was born from miscarriages of justice, when statements were taken by police from defendants under duress.”
Rally in support of woman in Cyprus ‘rape’ case
Victoria Derbyshire, BBC Two, 6 January [>]
“Forensic linguist Dr Andrea Nini analysed the police statement of a British woman convicted over a false rape claim, where she withdrew the original allegation.”
Dr Andrea Nini 