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Article published In:
Police interviews: Communication challenges and solutions
Edited by Luna Filipović
[Pragmatics and Society 10:1] 2019
► pp. 32–48

“You keep telling us different things, what do we believe?”

Meta-communication and meta-representation in police interviews

 | University of East Anglia
Quotation and reflective interpretation of previous statements are common features in police interviews. Of particular importance is the uncovering of apparent contradictions between earlier and current responses in interviews of suspects. Conflicting statements can be used by officers as triggers to elicit new responses that explain inconsistencies. In linguistic pragmatics, such reflective commenting on utterances is categorised as metacommunication, i.e. ‘communication about communication’, which includes metarepresentation, i.e. second-order representation of another representation through some form of quotation. Such instances of metacommunication are key instances of negotiating the communicative interests of its chief participants, which in suspect interviews consist on the one hand in the interviewers’ purpose of establishing grounds for a potential criminal charge and, on the other hand, the interviewee’s interest in avoiding such a charge. This article analyses exemplary cases of metacommunication in multilingual police interviews from the perspective of quotation pragmatics. The results suggest that police interview training should pay special attention to this area in order to optimise cognitive results.
Keywords: police interview, metacommunication, metarepresentation, pragmatics, quotation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Metacommunication and metarepresentation in interviews of suspects
  • 2.The importance of being quoted: Cautions, quotations and metacommunicative argument loops
  • 3.The importance of being earnestly allowed to reinterpret one’s own quotes
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.00014.mus
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