Intertextuality and comembership by university police call-takers in relaying information from laypeople in emergency calls to 911

Abstract

Linguistic studies of emergency calls have explored their interactional structure (Zimmerman, 1984; Natrass et al., 2017) and the practices used by callers to successfully describe the nature and location of their problems (Paoletti, 2012; Garcia, 2015). Building on research on emergency calls to university police (Kevoe-Feldman, 2016) and on how callers and call-takers in these calls negotiate misunderstandings (Tracy, 1997), this paper addresses the following research question: What practices do university police call-takers use to describe situations to 911 when relaying information from calls with members of the university community? Examining three pairs of calls where members of the university community first call university police followed by the university police call-taker calling 911 about the same situation, I use discourse analysis to identify how university police call-takers highlight their shared social background or “comembership” (Erickson, 2011) while recycling, rekeying, and reframing information from laypeople (Tannen, 2006) in calls to 911. By highlighting how university police call-takers use such practices to overcome discursive challenges in managing events with laypeople and 911 call-takers, this paper provides practical applications for training of university police and 911 call centers and introduces directions for research on improving interactions between callers and call-takers.