Exploring the use of deictic expressions in police interrogations: A pragmatic perspective

Abstract

People are in need to be provided with a number of approaches of understanding the nature and the relationship of the police interrogation between interrogators and suspects inside the interrogation room from a pragmatic point of view. Nevertheless, extracting the truth from the mouths of the suspects is not that easy task unless it is preceded by certain skills and strategies utilised by the detective to arrive at the confession and the judiciary evidences. The present paper deals with the concept of deixis of American police interrogations. What is more, the current study tries to answer the following questions: first, what are the types of deixis that are used in police interrogation? Second, what is the most frequent one that is used by both interlocutors. Third, what are the pragmatic functions of these uses? Moreover, the paper aims at investigating the deixis pragmatically and finding out to what extent their use could serve the process of interrogation and truth seeking and to survey the relevant pragmatic theory of deixis and certain account of the process of police interrogation. The methodology of this paper is based on Brown all the types of deixis. This paper concludes that: deictic expressions are heavily utilized between the interlocutors as a reference to the set of the events under discussion and they serve to locate every single detail of the events to be interrogated.