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When police treat straightforward answers as uncooperative
journal contribution
posted on 2017-06-09, 09:45 authored by Charles Antaki, Elizabeth StokoeIn formal police interviews, interviewers may have institutionally mandated reasons for following up even apparently fully co-operative answers with questions that imply that the interviewee is in fact (knowingly or unknowingly) being uncooperative. From a sample of over 100 UK interviews with suspects arrested for minor offences, and 19 interviews with witnesses alleging sexual assault, we identify and analyse follow-up questions which do not presume that interviewees' apparently 'normal' answers respect the Gricean maxims of quantity, quality, relevance or manner. We identify three institutional motivations working to over-ride the normal communicative contract: to 'get the facts straight'; to prepare for later challenges; and pursue a description of events that more evidently categorizes the alleged perpetrators' behaviour as criminal.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Journal of PragmaticsCitation
ANTAKI, C. and STOKOE, E., 2017. When police treat straightforward answers as uncooperative. Journal of Pragmatics, 117, pp. 1-15.Publisher
© ElsevierVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-06-01Publication date
2017Notes
This paper was published in the journal Journal of Pragmatics and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.05.012.ISSN
0378-2166Publisher version
Language
- en