[Corpora-List] Plagiarism of Leonid Brezhnev

[Trevor Jenkins]

On 4 Nov 2012, at 08:50, Yuri Tambovtsev <yutamb at mail.ru> wrote:

> Plagiarism of Leonid Brezhnev!
>  I have analysed three books signed by the late General Secretary of the communist party of the former Soviet Union. It turned out that it was not Leonid Brezhnev who wrote them. He hired three other men who wrote these books for him. May I ask you a question now? I wonder if I can call it plagiarism?
> 
If he paid them to write in his name then it's almost certainly not plagiarism but ghost-writing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter 

But how different is this from say an employee writing a publication for their employer as part of their job or a speech writer writing speeches for politicians? 

Whereas the Iraqi WMD dossier published by the British Government is not so clear cut. It contains substantial uncredited passages from a report written by a specialist.
> I wonder if some forensic centers study plagiarism? Do you know any particular linguists who do it?
> 
You might be interested in "Word Crime" by John Olsson (who claims to be the world's only full time forensic linguist) or "An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence" by Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson. Both have sections on plagiarism determination. Olsson describes being an expert witness in several court cases of plagiarism in published works (typically fiction). His is a more anecdotal approach to the subject; Coulthard's and Johnson's is an under-graduate/graduate introduction to the topic.

Coulthard and Johnson are members of the Forensic Linguistics centre at Aston. Olsson, last I heard, was organising a course at Bangor University in Wales.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!

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