In:Police Interviews: Communication challenges and solutions
Edited by Luna Filipović
[Benjamins Current Topics 118] 2021
► pp. 51–72
“Would it be fair to say that you actively sought out material?”
Mitigation and aggravation in police investigative interviews
Published online: 2 July 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.118.04pab
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.118.04pab
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 chapter 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: mitigation, aggravation, illocutionary force, speech acts, police interviews
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Police interviews: Process and questioning
- 3.Questioning from a linguistic perspective
- 3.1Speech Acts: Mitigation and aggravation
- 3.2Classification and uses of mitigation
- 4.Data and analytical approach
- 5.Analysis of results
- 5.1Mitigation
- 5.2Aggravation
- 6.Discussion: Mitigation and aggravation strategies in investigative interviews
- 7.Conclusion
Acknowledgements Notes References
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