The present paper addresses the question of the nature of deceptive language. Specifically, the main aim of this piece of research is the exploration of deceit in Spanish written communication. We have designed an automatic classifier based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) for the identification of deception in an ad hoc opinion corpus. In order to test the effectiveness of the LIWC2001 categories in Spanish, we have drawn a comparison with a Bag-of-Words (BoW) model. The results indicate that the classification of the texts is more successful by means of our initial set of variables than with the latter system. These findings are potentially applicable to areas such as forensic linguistics and opinion mining, where extensive research on languages other than English is needed.

Psychopathy involves a series of specific cognitive, social and emotional features which make the psychopath different from the general population; the two most significant characteristics are extreme selfishness and deep emotional deficit that is reflected in apathy. Notably, psychopaths are skilled communicators who that use language to lie. As there has been little examination of the speech associated specifically with psychopaths, especially in the Spanish language, the present study aims to contrast different veracious excerpts to others which are deceptive. The text analysis is framed within forensic computational linguistics, and complemented with some information related to the stylometric profile of the text. The investigation shows how the parameter mainly affected by the psychological condition of the psychopath subject is the distribution of grammatical persons; in addition, some further evidence includes the frequency of certainty adverbs and verbs related to cognitive processes.

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Support verb constructions figure among the most frequently investigated topics in the literature on collocation. So far, most studies of this kind have focused on bipartite structures, consisting of a verbal collocate and a nominal base. Accordingly, the analysis of how support verbs are distributed has concentrated almost exclusively on the lexical control exerted by the base. In this article, we draw attention towards the influence exerted by the participation of verb and noun in more complex patterns of lexical co-occurrence. We contend that the distribution of the support verb collocate is contingent not only on the base noun but also on other elements of the lexical context. This highlights the need to enrich the theoretical framework of collocation analysis with the additional descriptive category of ‘second-order collocate’. The proposal is illustrated with two case studies using a large-scale web corpus of English.