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Mitigation and aggravation in police investigative interviews

Bibliographic Data

ID21200929
AuthorsCarlos De Pablos-Ortega (University of East Anglia, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume10
Issue1
Pages49-71
Publication date2019-05-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePragmatics and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1878-9714 • E-ISSN: 1878-9722
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/ps.00015.pab
OpenAlexW2914585780
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited17

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

Interview · Political science · Public relations · Applied Psychology · Deception detection and forensic psychology · Interpreting and Communication in Healthcare · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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