Abstract
This paper examines an Anglophonic corpus of institutional holdup notes (n=29) recovered by robbery detectives in a single Canadian city over a twenty-year period. Moreover, it examines how the recurrence of specific lexical structures in written content reflects a given offender’s awareness of his social position relative to both his victim and the institution where a robbery is committed. By disaggregating holdup notes into three distinct categories based on written content, it is argued that these categories reflect the willingness of perpetrators to adjust the content of these notes through a process of linguistic code switching that both enables and expedites the completion of the offence. It is additionally argued that the perceived formality of the institution targeted by perpetrators has an unconscious but direct bearing on the formality and structure of their writing.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Uninstantiability
- The meaning creation process, information, emotion, knowledge, two objects, and significance-effects: Some Peircean remarks
- General Semiotics (GS) as the all-round interdisciplinary organizer: GS versus philosophical fundamentalism
- Wittgenstein’s persuasive rhetoric
- An ideological content analysis of corporate manifestos: A foundational document approach
- Rhetorical transformation in Estonian political discourse during World War II
- Language as a complex algebra: Post-structuralism and inflectional morphology in Saussure’s Cours
- A semiotics of creativity and a poetic metaphor: Towards a dialogical relation of expression and explanation
- Dialogical sign and symbolic mediation: A quest for meaning and esthetic experience
- Towards a semiotic definition of discourse and a basis for a typology of discourses
- Defamation case law in Hong Kong: A corpus-based study
- Three Korean literati paintings of an orchid in the deconstructive process
- “Money. Armed. Quietly”: An analysis of criminogenic prose in institutional holdup notes
- Semiosis du corps dans la littérature sexologique arabe
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Uninstantiability
- The meaning creation process, information, emotion, knowledge, two objects, and significance-effects: Some Peircean remarks
- General Semiotics (GS) as the all-round interdisciplinary organizer: GS versus philosophical fundamentalism
- Wittgenstein’s persuasive rhetoric
- An ideological content analysis of corporate manifestos: A foundational document approach
- Rhetorical transformation in Estonian political discourse during World War II
- Language as a complex algebra: Post-structuralism and inflectional morphology in Saussure’s Cours
- A semiotics of creativity and a poetic metaphor: Towards a dialogical relation of expression and explanation
- Dialogical sign and symbolic mediation: A quest for meaning and esthetic experience
- Towards a semiotic definition of discourse and a basis for a typology of discourses
- Defamation case law in Hong Kong: A corpus-based study
- Three Korean literati paintings of an orchid in the deconstructive process
- “Money. Armed. Quietly”: An analysis of criminogenic prose in institutional holdup notes
- Semiosis du corps dans la littérature sexologique arabe