Abstract

The article considers the act-speech specifics of the investigator’s speech in conflict and competitive interactions “investigator – suspect/accused” in interrogations at the stage of pre-trial investigation. The study was based on transcripts of interrogations at police stations in the United Kingdom. The speech of the investigator as the initiator of communication and the representative of the institute is characterized by the use of both direct and indirect speech acts, devoid of personal connotations and perceived by the interviewee as typical models of communicative behaviour: indirect directives to avoid acts of direct impression, imperatives and hedge markers to mitigate directive allocation, objective with the infinitive constructions, conditional sentences, modal verbs with the function of logical inference, interrogative and negative questions. Direct acts of directives are not perceived as acts threatening the “face” of their addressee (“face-threatening acts”), but implement a direct strategy of politeness “on-record”, as it is perceived as part of the institutional requirements in the interaction of an investigator- an interrogated person. Manipulative techniques of an investigator in case of sabotage and pseudo-cooperation from an interrogated person are realized by speech acts of a directive illocutionary force with structural indicators of representatives, invective acts in the form of representatives that provoke an interlocutor to state the circumstances of the crime.

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