This paper analyses video recorded interactions between police officers and drivers in traffic stops in Russia. The interactions were recorded via cameras installed on the drivers’ car dashboards, and subsequently uploaded to YouTube; a practice to which over one million Russian motorists have resorted to counterbalance perceived high levels of bribery and corruption (Griaznova 2007). The analysis focuses on responses to opening requests for identification in five different encounters. These show that the drivers repeatedly engage in potentially interpersonally sensitive activities in which the vulnerability of face, especially that of the police officer, is interactionally manifested by launching counter requests in return. The organisation of the request–counter request sequences highlights how face and identity related concerns are interwoven in the participants’ attempts to contest each other’s authority.
Al Jazeera. 2012. Russian Car Cams Aim to Drive out Corruption. Accessed 2 September 2016. [URL]
Antaki, Charles, and Sue Widdicombe (eds). 1998. Identities in Talk. London: Sage Publications.
Balmforth, Tom. 2012. Cops, Cars, and Videotape: Russians Embrace Dash-Cam Craze. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Accessed 2 September 2016. [URL].
Bax, Ingrid. 1986. “How to Assign Work in an Office: A Comparison of Spoken and Written Directives in American English.” Journal of Pragmatics 10 (6): 673–692.
BBC. 2013. Meteor Highlights Rise of Dashboard Cameras in Russia. Accessed 2 September 2016. [URL]
Blitvich, Pilar Garcés-Conejos. 2013. “Introduction: Face, Identity and Im/politeness. Looking Backward, Moving Forward: From Goffman to Practice Theory.” Journal of Politeness Research 9 (1): 1–33.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bucholtz, Mary. 1999. “‘Why Be Normal?’: Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls.” Language in Society 28 (2): 203–223.
Cheloukhine, Serguei, Sanja Kutnjak Ivković, Qasim Haq, and Maria R. Haberfeld. 2015. “Police Integrity in Russia.” In Measuring Police Integrity Across the World, ed. by Sanja Kutnjak Ivković and Maria R. Haberfeld, 153–181. New York: Springer.
Chistyakova, Yulia, and Annette Robertson. 2012. “YouTube Cops and Power without Limits: Understanding Police Violence in 21st Century Russia.”The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 131. Assessed 31 August 2016. [URL].
Church, Amelia. 2012. Preference Organisation and Peer Disputes: How Young Children Resolve Conflict. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
Clark, Herbert, and Dale Schunk. 1980. “Polite Responses to Polite Requests.” Cognition 8 (2): 111–143.
Corsaro, William A., and Douglas W. Maynard. 1996. “Format Tying in Discussion and Argumentation among Italian and American Children.” In Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language, ed. by Dan I. Slobin, Julie Gerhardt, Amy Kyratzis, and Jiansheng Guo, 157–174. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness.” Journal of Pragmatics 25 (3): 349–367.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2005. “Impoliteness and Entertainment in the Television Quiz Show: The Weakest Link.” Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture 1 (1): 35–72.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan, Derek Bousfield, and Ann Wichmann. 2003. “Impoliteness Revisited: With Special Reference to Dynamic and Prosodic Aspects.” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (10): 1545–1579.
Curl, Traci S., and Paul Drew. 2008. “Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 41 (2): 129–153.
Dastjerdi, Hossein Vahid, Mehdi Latifi, and Elham Mohammadi. 2011. “Analysis of Power and Threat Manifestation in the Discourse of Traffic Police Officers: A CDA Perspective.” Journal of Language Teaching and Research 2 (1): 255–260.
Davidson, Judy. 1984. “Subsequent Versions of Invitations, Offers, Requests, and Proposals Dealing with Potential or Actual Rejection.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. by Maxwell J. Atkinson and John Heritage, 102–128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dorodnych, Anatoly. 1995. “A Study of Requests in English, Russian and Ukrainian.” Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics 301: 55–63.
Drew, Paul. 1997. “Open Class Repair Initiators in Response to Sequential Sources of Troubles in Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 28 (1): 69–101.
Eisenberg, Ann R., and Catherine Garvey. 1981. “Children’s Use of Verbal Strategies in Resolving Conflicts.” Discourse Processes 4 (2): 149–170.
Ervin-Tripp, Susan. 1976. “‘Is Sybil There?’ The Structure of Some American English Directives.” Language in Society 5 (1): 25–66.
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London and New York: Longman.
Farman, Jason. 2012. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge.
Fraser, Bruce, and William Nolen. 1981. “The Association of Deference with Linguistic Form.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 271: 93–110.
Friedrich, Paul. 1972. “Social Context and Semantic Feature: The Russian Pronominal Usage.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics, ed. by John J. Gumperz and Dell H. Hymes, 270–300. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Galperina, Marina. 2012. Dash-cams: Russia’s Last Hope for Civility and Survival on the Road. Accessed August 31, 2016. [URL]
Garfinkel, Harold. 1984. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Oxford: Polity Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Goffman, Erving. 1961. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Interaction. New York: Pantheon.
Goodwin, Charles. 2006. “Retrospective and Prospective Orientation in the Construction of Argumentative Moves.” Text & Talk. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies 26 (4–5): 443–461.
Goodwin, Marjorie H. 2002. “Exclusion in Girls’ Peer Groups: Ethnographic Analysis of Language Practices on the Playground.” Human Development 451: 392–415.
Goodwin, Marjorie H., and Charles Goodwin. 1987. “Children’s Arguing.” In Language, Gender, and Sex in Comparative Perspective, ed. by Susan U. Philips, Susan Steele, and Christine Tanz, 200–248. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Griaznova, Olga S. 2007. “Russian Residents’ Attitudes Toward the Law-Enforcement Agencies: A Review of Recent Research.” Russian Politics and Law 45 (3): 74–104.
Gudkov, Lev. 2000. “Otnoshenie k Pravovym Institutam v Rossii [The attitude toward legal institutions in Russia].” Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes 3 (47): 30–39.
Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Vol. 11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gumperz, John. J. 1992. “Contextualization and Understanding.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, 229–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haugh, Michael. 2013. “Im/politeness, Social Practice and the Participation Order.” Journal of Pragmatics 581: 52–72.
Have, Paul ten. 2007. Doing Conversation Analysis: A Practical Guide. London: Sage.
Haworth, Kate. 2006. “The Dynamics of Power and Resistance in Police Interview Discourse.” Discourse & Society 117 (6): 739–759.
Heritage, John J. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Heinemann, Trine. 2006. “‘Will You or Can’t You?’: Displaying Entitlement in Interrogative Requests.” Journal of Pragmatics 38 (7): 1081–1104.
Hester, Stephen, and Peter Eglin (eds). 1997. Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis. Washington, D.C.: International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis & University Press of America.
Holtgraves, Thomas. 1992. “The Linguistic Realization of Face Management: Implications for Language Production and Comprehension, Person Perception, and Cross-cultural Communication.” Social Psychology Quarterly 5521: 141–159.
Housley, William, and Richard Fitzgerald. 2009. “Membership Categorization, Culture and Norms in Action.” Discourse & Society 20 (3): 345–362.
Hudson, James R. 1970. “Police-citizen Encounters that Lead to Citizen Complaints.” Social Problems 18 (2): 179–193.
Hutchby, Ian, and Robin Wooffitt. 1998. Conversational Analysis: Principles, Practices and Applications. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
Ilie, Cornelia. 1994. What Else Can I Tell You?: A Pragmatic Study of English Rhetorical Questions as Discursive and Argumentative Acts. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.
Jaffe, Alexandra (ed). 2009. Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jayyusi, Lena. 1984. Categorization and the Moral Order. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Jefferson, Gail. 1978. “Sequential Aspects of Storytelling in Conversation.” In Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, ed. by Jim Schenkein, 219–248. New York: Academic Press.
Kádár, Daniel, and Rosina Márquez Reiter. 2015. “(Im)politeness and (Im)morality: Insights from Intervention.” Journal of Politeness Research 11 (2): 239–260.
Keisanen, Tiina, and Mirka Rauniomaa. 2012. “The Organization of Participation and Contingency in Prebeginnings of Request Sequences.” Research on Language & Social Interaction 45 (4): 323–351.
Kent, Alexandra. 2012. “Compliance, Resistance and Incipient Compliance When Responding to Directives.” Discourse Studies 14 (6): 711–730.
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Cathérine. 2005. “Politeness in France: How to Buy Bread Politely.” In Politeness in Europe, ed. by Leo Hickey and Miranda Stewart, 29–57. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Kovalev, Vitaly V., Liliya V. Sazhina, and Natalia B. Ivanova. 2014. “Ljubov’ k videoregistratoram v Rossii: sociokul’turnye osobennosti mentaliteta ili zashchita ot korrupcii dorozhnoj policii? [Love of Video Cameras In Russia: Socio-cultural Peculiarities of Mentality or Protection Against Corruption of Traffic Police?].” Perm University Herald. Philosophy. Psychology. Sociology 1 (17): 128–137.
Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Liddicoat, Anthony J. 2011. An Introduction to Conversation Analysis. London: Continuum.
Limberg, Holger. 2008. “Threats in Conflict Talk: Impoliteness and Manipulation.” In Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, ed. by Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher, 155–179. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Locher, Miriam A. 2004. Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Locher, Miriam A. 2010. “Relational work, politeness, and identity construction”. In APA Handbook of Interpersonal Communication, ed. by David Matsumoto, 112–138. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Locher, Miriam A. 2011. “Situated Impoliteness: The Interface Between Relational Work and Identity Construction.” In Situated Politeness, ed. by Bethan L. Davies, Michael Haugh, and Andrew John Merrison, 187–208. London: Continuum.
Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria. 2008. “Real disorder in the court: An investigation of conflict talk in US television courtroom shows.” Media, Culture & Society 30 (1): 189–216.
Markee, Numa. 1995. “Teachers’ Answers to Students’ Questions: Problematizing the Issue of Making Meaning.” Issues in Applied Linguistics 6 (2): 63–92.
Markee, Numa. 2004. “Zones of Interactional Transition in ESL Classes.” Modern Language Journal 88 (4): 583–596.
Márquez Reiter, Rosina. 2011. Mediated Business Interactions: Intercultural Communication Between Speakers of Spanish. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Matsumoto, Yoshiko. 1988. “Reexamination of the Universality of Face: Politeness Phenomena in Japanese.” Journal of Pragmatics 12 (4): 403–426.
McKinlay, Andy, and Anne Dunnett. 1998. “How Gun Owners Accomplish Being Deadly Average.” In Identities in Talk, ed. by Charles Antaki and Sue Widdicombe, 34–51. London: Sage.
Merritt, Marilyn. 1976. “On Questions Following Questions in Service Encounters.” Language in Society 5 (3): 315–357.
Miller, Daniel (ed). 2001. Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg.
Mills, Sara. 2003. Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Minchin, Elizabeth. 2002. “Verbal Behaviour in its Social Context: Three Question Strategies in Homer’s Odyssey.” The Classical Quarterly (New Series) 52 (1): 15–32.
MVD Rossii. 2013. Gosavtoinspekcija o videoregistratorah [The State Motor Vehicle Inspectorate on DVR cams]. Assessed August 31 2016. [URL]
Ogiermann, Eva. 2009. Politeness and In-directness Across Cultures: A Comparison of English, German, Polish and Russian Requests. Journal of Politeness Research 5 (2): 189–216.
Perelmutter, Renee. 2010. “Impoliteness Recycled: Subject Ellipsis in Modern Russian Complaint Discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (12): 3214–3231.
Pomerantz, Anita. 1984. “Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes.” In Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. by Maxwell J. Atkinson and John Heritage, 57–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pomerantz, Anita, and Jenny Mandelbaum. 2005. “Conversation Analytic Approaches to the Relevance and Uses of Relationship Categories in Interaction.” In Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, ed. by Kristine Fitch and Robert Sanders, 149–171. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Rawls, Anne Warfield. 1987. “The Interaction Order Sui Generis: Goffman’s Contribution to Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 5 (2): 136–149.
Rønneberg, Kari, and Jan Svennevig. 2010. “Declining to Help: Rejections in Service Requests to the Police.” Discourse & Communication 4 (3): 279–305.
Rossijskaja Gazeta. 2009. “Prikaz Ministersva Vnutrennih Del Rossijskoj Federacii ot 2 Marta 2009 goda N 185” [Order of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Russia No 185 of March 2, 2009]. Rossijskaja gazeta. Federal’nyj vypusk 4946 (122). Assessed August 31, 2016. [URL]
Rossijskaja Gazeta. 2011. “Federal’nyj Zakon ot 7 Fevralja 2011 g. N 3-FZ ‘O Policii’” [Federal Law No. 3-FZ of February 7, 2011 ‘On the Police’]. Rossijskaja gazeta. Federal’nyj vypusk 5401 (25). Assessed October 19, 2016. [URL]
Sacks, Harvey. 1995. Lectures on Conversation. Volumes I & II1, ed. by Gail Jefferson (with an Introduction by Emanuel A. Schegloff.) Oxford: Blackwell.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1991. “Reflections on Talk and Social Structure.” In Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, ed. by Deirdre Boden and Don H. Zimmerman, 44–70. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1992. “Repair After Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in Conversation.” American Journal of Sociology 97 (5): 1295–1345.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1980. “Preliminaries to Preliminaries: ‘Can I Ask You a Question?’” Sociological Inquiry 50 (3–4): 104–152.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction. Vol. 1: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A., Gail Jefferson, and Harvey Sacks. 1977. “The Preference for Self-Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation.” Language 53 (2): 361–382.
Searle, John R. 1979. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shon, Phillip C. 1998. “Now You Got a Dead Baby on Your Hands’: Discursive Tyranny in ‘Cop Talk’.” Revue Internationale de Semiotique Juridique 11 (3): 275–301.
Shon, Phillip C. 2002. “Bringing the Spoken Words Back: Conversationalizing (Postmodernizing) Police-Citizen Encounter Research.” Critical Criminology 11 (2): 151–172.
Shon, Phillip C. 2005. “‘I’d Grab the SOB by His Hair and Yank Him out the Window’: The Fraternal Order of Warnings and Threats in Police-Citizen Encounters.” Discourse & Society 16 (6): 829–845.
Shon, Phillip C. 2008. Language and Demeanor in Police-Citizen Encounters. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America.
Silverman, David. 1998. Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen (ed). 2000. Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London: Continuum.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2013. “Relating at Work: Facets, Dialectics and Face.” Journal of Pragmatics 581: 121–137.
Tajfel, Henry. 1982. “Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations.” Annual Review of Psychology 33 (1): 1–39.
TASS. 2013. Fines for Traffic Violations Registered by Video Cameras on Roads in the Moscow Region Amounted to 800 Million Roubles Last Year. Accessed 1 September 2016. [URL]
Thompson, Sandra A., Barbara A. Fox, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (eds). 2015. Grammar in Everyday Talk: Building Responsive Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Toepfl, Florian. 2011. “Managing Public Outrage: Power, Scandal, and New Media in Contemporary Russia.” New Media & Society 13 (8): 1301–1319.
Tracy, Karen, and Donald L. Anderson. 1999. “Relational Positioning Strategies in Police Calls: A Dilemma.” Discourse Studies 1 (2): 201–225.
Transparency International. 2015. Corruption Perceptions Index 2015. Assessed September 2 2016. [URL]
Vinkhuyzen, Erik, and Margaret H. Szymanski. 2005. “‘Would you Like to Do it Yourself?’ Service Requests and their Non-granting Responses.” In Applying Conversation Analysis, ed. by Keith Richards and Paul Seedhouse, 91–106. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wade, Terence L.B. 1992. A Comprehensive Russian Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Whalen, Marilyn R., and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. “Sequential and Institutional Contexts in Calls for Help.” Social Psychology Quarterly 50 (2): 172–185.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1991. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Yoong, David. 2010. “Interactional Norms in the Australian Police Interrogation Room.” Discourse & Society 21 (6): 693–713.
Zimmerman, Don H. 1984. “Talk and Its Occasion: The Case of Calling the Police.” In Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications, ed. by Deborah Schiffrin, 210–228. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Zimmerman, Don H. 1992. “The Interactional Organization of Calls for Emergency Assistance.” In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 418–469. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zimmerman, Don H. 1998. “Identity, Context and Interaction.” In Identities in Talk, ed. by Charles Antaki and Sue Widdicombe, 87–106. London: Sage.
Cited by (7)
Cited by seven other publications
Song, Chuting & Xinren Chen
2024. Veteran Chinese traffic police officers’ positive rapport management in discourse: A case study. Journal of Pragmatics 230 ► pp. 142 ff.
Mora-Rodriguez, Michael
2022. Resolving suspicion moment-by-moment. The overall structural organization of police encounters in the Spain-France border area. Language & Communication 87 ► pp. 161 ff.
Mora-Rodriguez, Michael & Carles Roca-Cuberes
2022. Everyday Practices in Dealing with Cross-Border Crime: Some Insights from Conversation Analysis. Social Sciences 12:1 ► pp. 6 ff.
Márquez Reiter, Rosina & Adriana Patiño‐Santos
2021. The politics of conviviality: On‐the‐ground experiences from Spanish‐speaking Latin Americans in Elephant and Castle, London. Journal of Sociolinguistics 25:5 ► pp. 662 ff.
ÇETİNAVCI, Uğur Recep
2020. Naturally occurring requests in Turkish: A case from an academic context. Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics► pp. 285 ff.
de Castro Neto, Miguel, Marcel Nascimento, Pedro Sarmento, Sara Ribeiro, Teresa Rodrigues & Marco Painho
2019. A Dashboard for Security Forces Data Visualization and Storytelling. In Information Systems for Industry 4.0 [Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, 31], ► pp. 47 ff.
Márquez-Reiter, Rosina & Michael Haugh
2019. Denunciation, blame and the moral turn in public life. Discourse, Context & Media 28 ► pp. 35 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.