Is there a fingerprint in the syntax of your email?

The New York Times tells of a lawsuit "filed by Paul Ceglia, owner of a wood-pellet fuel company in upstate New York. Mr. Ceglia says that a work-for-hire contract he arranged with Mark Zuckerberg, then an 18-year-old Harvard freshman, entitles him to half of the Facebook fortune." The gist of the evidence is a collection of emails purportedly from Zuckerberg to Ceglia, ostensibly saved in Word files. The foundation of the refutation is an analysis of syntactical minutiae -- whether "internet" is capitalized or "cannot" is one word or two as commonly written by the Facebook founder.

Many linguists, however, would challenge the notion that the “fingerprint,” a supposedly unique identifier, can be metaphorically applied to writing. Surely we all have our own written quirks and mannerisms — I tend to overuse em-dashes, for instance. But there is just too much internal variability in any person’s body of writing to imagine that we could take just a bit of it — a handful of e-mails — and recognize some sort of linguistic DNA.