Plagiarism

Direction of plagiarism
Most plagiarism inquiries are concerned more with detecting plagiarism than with its direction, which is
often taken as a given. In fact, observing differences between prior and subsequent texts can be
instructive in looking for the kinds of change which occur in language as a result of a plagiarism process.
Because most plagiarism investigations are concerned with detecting whether plagiarism has taken place,
and because it is usually known which of two texts preceded the other, plagiarism direction research is by
and large an unexplored country.

Types of text dating and sourcing what plagiarists do with language

Text dating mean the process of attempting to determine which of two texts preceded each other
temporally. In the case of texts where there are clear signs of plagiarism, it may be necessary to 'date'
them, i.e. to assess which of the two authors copied from the other.
Based on previous experience, that text dating or 'sourcing' can be considered to be of three types. The
first is diachronic dating, which is where a significant time period has elapsed between the earlier and
later text. A suggested minimum time lapse for the observation of significant cultural changes to feed
through to the language in the form of discourse styles, lexicon, phrasing and politeness forms would
probably be about 20 years for most genres. However, one cannot be inflexible: a single event can change
perceptions across the world, and so a lesser time period could be considered. On the other hand some
genres change much more conservatively and so in those cases 30 or 50 years may be more appropriate.
In such a case one would look for 'earlier' language in a later text, for words which had become
redundant.
The second type of text sourcing to consider is cultural sourcing (i.e. the process of text dating by
reference to culture), where one author may originate from a different culture than the other author, for
example a UK author plagiarizing from a US author or vice versa. In a case like this we might expect to
find instances of different lexical tokens for the same entity, different modes of address, a greater
commonality of a certain phrase in the one culture rather than the other, etc. The issue here would be an
inappropriate or infrequent cultural token appearing in one or other of the texts relative to its appropriacy
or frequency in the other. We should also note that culture, in this sense, need riot be 'national' culture - it
could be based on age, gender, political affiliation, ethnic or religious group, class, etc.
Lastly, archaeological sourcing, which is the process of excavating two synchronous or almost
synchronous texts to find which of the two presents symptoms of originality and which presents
symptoms of copying - relative to each other.

So, what do plagiarists do then?

In answer to this question, posed earlier, it seems on the basis of the above discussion on types of
plagiarism, that plagiarists do three things (allowing for some overlap between the three types):
 Archaeological plagiarsts - the most common type - take an artefact and try to disguise its surface
by substituting some of its parts and by re-arranging others.
 Diachronie plagiarists take an artefact from an earlier period and try to disguise its chronicity, by
translating it into an artefact of their own time.
  Cultural plagiarists transpose elements of their own culture onto a cultural artefact of another
culture or, alternatively, try to take cultural artefacts from elsewhere and convert them into own
culture substitutes.
Needless to say, each of these three activities of plagiarism has its pitfalls for the unwary. The
archaeological plagiarist is in danger because it is relatively easy to exhume common lexes and warped
structures from the dust of two superficially different objects. The diachronic plagiarist is in danger
because it is relatively easy to overlook small but critical differences which occur in a given culture over
a period of time, while the cultural plagiarist would need a close familiarity with both source and target
cultures to make sure that values from the source culture were not falsely imposed on the parasitic text, or
that elements from the target culture were not 'false friends' of the source culture.

A note on readability and plagiarism

Interestingly, the connection between readability and plagiarism is not entirely new. Glatt and Haertel
(1982) developed a way of using the cloze test to check for plagiarism. They blanked out every fifth word
of a suspect text and asked the suspect plagiarist to fill in the blanks. They found that those who had
plagiarized consistently produced lower scores on the cloze test than those who had not plagiarized. Much
earlier, W. L. Taylor (1953) had suggested the use of the cloze test as a readability test: if a panel of
ordinary readers were unable to fill in above 40 per cent of blanked out words correctly, it was a sign that
a text was 'unreadable'. Anything above 60 per cent meant that the text was highly readable.
More recently Knight et al (2004) found that using sentences with lower readability scores from suspect
texts was more likely to assist in internet searching for plagiarism. What Knight et al. did was to measure
the readability score of each sentence in a text, then put to one side those sentences with grade level
scores below 10 and submit those to internet searches.
They found this technique highly successful, and the work I have reported here (during most of which
time I was unaware of their work) bears out their findings, though I would suggest the grade level of 10 is
somewhat arbitrary: in general it would be better to take each text on a case by case basis, determine the
mean grade level and then find those sentences in that text which deviate most from that mean.
Alternatively, the authors could take the mean for a class or group of students and find deviations in
individual students' sentences from that mean.
The above observations about the different types of text dating in plagiarism are really cultural, and not
strictly speaking linguistic observations. For the linguist what is much more interesting is the question of
what happens to the text at the lexical level when it is plagiarized. We go into more detail about this
elsewhere, but for now it is sufficient to observe that the plagiarist has to model the copy lexicon on the
source lexicon in a way which is counter to how we usually make our lexical selections. Briefly, most
lexical choices are made unconsciously when we compose a text. We are usually unaware of the many
reasons why we make specific choices. However, the plagiarist has to take the source lexicon into
account, in effect to avoid many of the source lexical choices.
Unconscious selection of the lexicon usually results in prototypical items being chosen (Rosch et al,
1976), but the plagiarist has a problem in this case: the available prototypical lexis has already been used -
to make the plagiary opaque it is necessary to choose different items from those found in the source text.
Selection is thus conscious, rather than unconscious and - I suggest - forced, and sometimes even strained.
This could be the cause of the plagiarist's text often being less readable than the author's text.