“You keep telling us different things, what do we believe?”
Meta-communication and meta-representation in police interviews
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.
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
-
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Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Filipović, Luna
2021.
Confession to Make: Inadvertent Confessions and Admissions in United Kingdom and United States Police Contexts.
Frontiers in Psychology 12

Filipović, Luna
2022.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Miscommunication in UK Police Interviews and US Police Interrogations.
Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology 37:2
► pp. 297 ff.

Filipović, Luna
2022.
Language and Culture as Sources of Inequality in US Police Interrogations.
Applied Linguistics 43:6
► pp. 1073 ff.

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