TALK: 'Did you have permission to smash
your neighbour's door?': Silly questions and their
answers in police-suspect interrogations.
Liz Stokoe & Derek Edwards (Loughborough
University, UK)
Friday, April 6 / 1:30 PM
Phelps 2536
We examine the asking and answering of silly questions
(SQs, for example, "might sound a bit silly, but
do you know whose window it is?") in British police
interviews with suspects, the courses of action SQs
initiate, and the institutional contingencies they
are designed to manage. We show how SQs are asked at
an important juncture toward the ends of interviews,
following police officers’ formulations of suspects’ testimony
(e.g. "so you’ve admitted throwing eggs").
These formulations are confirmed or even collaboratively
produced by suspects. We then examine the design of
SQs and show how they play a central role in the articulation
of suspects’ reported state of mind, and particularly
attributing to them criminal intentions constitutive
of the offence with which they may be charged. In cases
where SQs do not produce unambiguous answers about
state of mind or intentionality, police officers move
toward direct questioning about suspects’ intent,
thus making explicit the project of SQs in such interviews.
Following SQ-Answer sequences, police officers reformulate
suspects’ testimony, with subtle but crucial
differences with regard to suspects’ knowledge
state and criminal intent. Suspects overwhelmingly
align with police officers’ formulations of their
testimony, and such agreements have the interactional
shape of affiliation. Yet SQs may work in ways that
are institutionally adversarial with regard to criminal
charges, relevant evidence and self-incriminating testimony.
Bio
Liz Stokoe's main interest is in the relevance of
gender to social interaction, as well as institutional
interaction of various kinds. She has written about
feminism and ethnomethodology, the organization of
tutorial talk, news media interviews, discourse and
identity, neighbour relationships, 'noise' as a social
phenomenon, and narration and story formulations. Derek
Edwards writes about the management of psychological
business in everyday talk, sometimes called 'discursive
psychology'. †His current focus is on subject-object
relations, i.e., the ways in which talk (and occasionally
text) manages the subjective and/or objective bases
of descriptions and versions; e.g., how objectivity
is produced and countered, how bias, prejudice, commitment,
motivation or investment are handled, as members’ practical
concerns within activities such as reporting and complaining.
Locations for examining these things have included
mundane talk, and talk in various settings such as
classrooms, counselling, police interrogations, and
dispute mediation. Liz and Derek are both currently
working on a three-year UK Research Council project
into neighbour relationships and disputes, focusing
on a variety of topics and interactional practices
including 'mundane morality', reported speech, racial
insults, intimacy, 'self help', 'silly questions',
reports of racism, uses of the modal 'would', 'honesty
phrases', the formulation of actions and their intentionality,
and the construction and deployment of identity categories
in the accomplishment of social action.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Language, Interaction
and Social Organizations (LISO) Research Focus Group
