| As teens today have more access to the internet, sexual predators looking for underage targets have a larger hunting ground and increased access to their victims; by posing as teens online, the organization Perverted Justice has aided in 600 convictions of sexual predators since June 2004. By building corpora of the language used by convicted sexual predators, decoys, and actual teens, and performing a corpus-driven analysis of them, I aim to answer the question "What are key features of sexual predator, decoy, and teen language in online communication?" I hypothesize that sexual predators will utilize the most sexual terms; decoys will use the most internet "textisms;" and teenagers will employ the most emoticons. A corpus analysis including generation of word lists and key word lists analyzing these features found that these hypotheses were supported, and there were notable differences in the linguistic patterns utilized by each group. In the future, findings from this analysis can aid in the analysis of how skilled these decoys are at mimicking teen language and aid decoys in being more believable in their endeavors to pose as teens. |
