“Do what I tell you, otherwise she will die...” Contrastive analysis of anonymous letters in Polish and Dutch

Abstract

This article deals with the topic of anonymous extortion letters. Anonymous extortion letters are a challenge for linguists and criminal intelligence services and raise a whole range of questions that ultimately allow a creation of the psycholinguistic portrait of the possible author/-perpetrator. One of these questions concerns the emotional layer of the anonymous letter and the way anonymous authors express their emotions in language. This article describes a specific type of speech genre, which is anonymous extortion letter and analyses, in short, emotions in language. The last part presents the author’s own research, focusing on the characteristics of simulated and falsified extortion letters in the Dutch and Polish languages.