“Would it be fair to say that you actively sought out material?” Mitigation and aggravation in police investigative interviews

de Pablos-Ortega, Carlos (2019) “Would it be fair to say that you actively sought out material?” Mitigation and aggravation in police investigative interviews. Pragmatics and Society, 10 (1). pp. 50-72. ISSN 1878-9714

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	mitigation,aggravation,illocutionary force,speech acts,police interviews,sdg 16 - peace, justice and strong institutions ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/peace_justice_and_strong_institutions
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Language and Communication Studies
Related URLs:	https://benjamins.com/catalog/ps.00015.p...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	28 Jan 2019 15:30
Last Modified:	21 Jul 2023 09:51
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/69707
DOI:	10.1075/ps.00015.pab

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