Article published in:

Police interviews: Communication challenges and solutions
Edited by Luna Filipović
[Pragmatics and Society 10:1] 2019
► pp. 49–71

“Would it be fair to say that you actively sought out material?”

Mitigation and aggravation in police investigative interviews

Carlos de Pablos-Ortega | University of East Anglia

The aim of investigative interviews is to gather comprehensive and reliable information from suspects, offenders, victims and witnesses through questioning. Research on questioning during police interviews has mainly explored question types and question approaches when interviewing adults and children. This paper is concerned with so far unexplored aspects of police interviewing, that is the employment of mitigating and aggravating linguistic devices in questions and statements and their pragmatic effects. The corpus consists of six police interviews with suspects of crime. Mitigation and aggravation strategies were extracted and a total of eighty-two instances were found, analysed and classified into a categorisation taxonomy which was designed to ascertain the types and functions of mitigation and aggravation devices. The findings reveal that more mitigation than aggravation strategies were used in police questioning and statements during the interviews. Mitigation was found to be used not only as a device for alleviating or attenuating, but also as a strategy to build rapport between suspects and police officers.

Keywords: aggravation, illocutionary force, mitigation, police interviews, speech acts

Published online: 28 May 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.00015.pab

References

Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper

1989 Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, Speech Acts, Politeness. Norwood, N. J.: Ablex.

Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson

1987 Politeness : Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Caffi, Claudia

2007 Mitigation. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Cederborg, Ann-Christin, Yael Orbach, Kathleen J. Sternberg and Michael Lamb

2000 “Investigative Interviews of Child Witnesses in Sweden”. Child Abuse and Neglect, 24 (10): 1355–1361.

College of Policing

. http://www.college.police.uk

Culpeper, Jonathan

2011 Impoliteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fisher, Ronald, Ralph E. Geiselman and D. S. Raymond

1987 “Critical Analysis of Police Interview Techniques”. Journal of Police Science and Administration 15 (3): 177–185.

Fraser, Bruce

1975 “Hedged Performatives”. In Syntax and Semantics (Vol. 3.): Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 187–210. New York: Academic Press.

2010 “Pragmatic Competence: The Case of Hedging”. New Approaches to Hedging, ed. by Gunther Kaltenböck, Wiltrud Mihatsch and Stefan Schneider, 15–34. Bingley, UK: Emerald.

Griffiths, Andy, and Rebecca Milne

2006 “Will It All End in Tiers? Police Interviews with Suspects in Britain”, Investigative Interviewing: Rights, Research, Regulation, ed. by Tom Williamson, 167–189. New York: Willan.

Holmes, Janet

1984 “Modifying Illocutionary Force.” Journal of Pragmatics 8:345–365.

[ p. 71 ]

Hübler, Axel

1983 Understatements and Hedges in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Korkman, Julia, Pekka Santtila, and N. Kenneth Sandnabba

2006 “Dynamics of Verbal Interaction between Interviewer and Child in Interviews with Alleged Victims of Child Sexual Abuse”. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 47 (2): 109–119.

Lakoff, Robin

1973 “Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts.” Journal of Philosophical Logic 2:458–508.

Lamb, Michael, Irit Hershkowitz, Kathleen J. Sternberg, Barbara Boat, and Mark Everson

1997 “Investigative Interviews of Alleged Sexual Abuse Victims with and without Anatomic Dolls”. Child Abuse & Neglect. 20(12): 1251–9.

Ministry of Justice

2011 “Achieving Best Evidence in Criminal Proceedings Guidance on Interviewing Victims and Witnesses, and Guidance on Using Special Measures.” https://www.cps.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/legal_guidance/best_evidence_in_criminal_proceedings.pdf

Morris, Pauline, Steven A. Richardson, Barbara Snell Dohrenwend, and David Klein

1965 Interviewing: Its Forms and Functions. New York: Basic Books.

Oxburgh, Gavin E., Trond Myklebust, Tim Grant, and Christian Meissner

2010 “Interview and Interrogation Methods and Their Effects on Investigative Outcomes.” International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 17 (1):45–66.

Phillips, Emma, Gavin Oxburgh, Amanda Gavin, and Trond Myklebust

2012 “Investigative Interviews with Victims of Child Sexual Abuse: The Relationship between Question Type and Investigation Relevant Information.” Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 27(1):45–54.

Schneider, Stefan

2010 “Mitigation.” In Interpersonal Pragmatics, edited by Miriam A. Locher and Sage L. Graham, 253–269. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Searle, John R.

1976 “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts.” Language in Society 5 (1):1–23.

1979 Expression and Meaning : Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thaler, Verena

2012 “Mitigation as Modification of Illocutionary Force.” Journal of Pragmatics 44 (6–7): 907–19.

[ p. 72 ]