We analyze questions and answers in police interrogations. By means of Conversation Analysis, we investigate how the preservation of information concerning crimes unfolds in the above-mentioned event. The analysis reveals that this preservation is not only accomplished by the suspects, but also ensued by the police officers in their questions.
Abstract: Questioning and answering are trivial activities in people’s lives, either in mundane or institutional talk-in-interaction. This study, interested in integrating a fine-grained analysis of (video)recorded interactions with Law practices, analyzes sequences of questions and answers, as well as their consequences, in an institutional event of which they are constitutive: police interrogations. By means of Ethomethodological and Multimodal Conversation Analysis (SACKS; SCHEGLOFF; JEFFERSON, 1974; SACKS, 1992; MONDADA, 2018), it investigates how the preservation of information concerning crimes unfolds in the above-mentioned event. The analysis of the audio and/or video-recorded interrogations reveals that the preservation of information about the crimes under investigation is not only accomplished by the interrogated suspects, but also ensued by the police officers in the design of their questions. Interrogated suspects safeguard facts related to the crimes by resisting in providing the information requested in responses that do not answer, but that instead claim lack of (1) knowledge; (2) remembrance; or (3) awareness. Police officers, on the other hand, afford and initiate information safeguarding by designing questions with mental verbs (e.g. “do you know”; “do you remember”), inviting – and even facilitating – suspects to (1) negate knowledge and remembrance of the requested information; and (2) align with the question format (by responding with “no”), thus doing no resistance. Based on these results, this empirical study reflects on the interface between Applied Linguistics and Law, as well as the contributions it has to offer to the investigated context and to the (Applied) Conversation Analysis framework. Keywords: Police Interrogations. Preservation of Information Concerning Crimes. Multimodal and Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis.
