Admission of guilt as a communicative project in judicial settings

Abstract

Admitting, or denying, that one has done something is a prototypical example of a so-called speech act (Searle 1969, 1975). Searle conceives of speech acts as doings by individual speakers. For example, admitting guilt would be something enacted by one single-person, the perpetrator, who thereby assumes responsibility for a particular, possibly unlawful, action performed in the past. In this paper, we will look at data from two judicial contexts, criminal court trials and police interrogations, in which admissions (and denials) obviously constitute significant, and institutionalized, elements. In opposition to speech-act theory, we will demonstrate that admissions or denials of guilt are communicative acts, performed in collaboration between two parties, i.e. the professional interviewer (judge or police officer) and the person, defendant or suspect, who allegedly had to admit or deny responsibility for a criminal action. In a comprehensive corpus (70 court trials and 30 police interrogations) we will study the sociolinguistic variation in the communicative acts involved.