A Presuppositional Approach To The Persuasive Strategies Of Investigative Interviews

With the development of interdisciplinary studies of pragmatics,investigative interview has gradually aroused the attention of pragmatic researchers,for it plays the role of detecting suspects’ psychological state,revealing the points of self-contradiction and lies in the suspects’ words and persuading the suspects to admit to their crimes.As one of the criminal investigation drama,American TV series Lie to Me has gradually attracted the interest of scholars from different domains since it made its debut in 2019.So far,the researches on this drama have been conducted mainly from the perspectives of linguistics and translation,and almost no research has been conducted from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition.In light of this situation,the present study is intended to explore how investigators apply presupposition triggers,properties and strategies in their persuasion of the suspects to admit to their crimes,and specifically address the following three questions:(1)What kind of presupposition triggers have been utilized in American TV series Lie to Me to achieve the purpose of persuasion?(2)How have the presupposition properties been manipulated in investigative interviews of American TV series Lie to Me to realize the purpose of persuasion?(3)How have the presupposition strategies been utilized in investigative interviews of American TV series Lie to Me to meet the goal of persuasion?Based on the case analysis of 46 investigative interviews randomly selected from the American TV series Lie to Me,this present study has arrived at the following results:First,the investigators in American TV series Lie to Me have exploited presupposition triggers at lexical and syntactic levels in their persuasion of suspects to plead guilty.To be specific,the triggers at lexical level include definite descriptions,factive verbs,change-of-state verbs,iterative words,and the triggers at syntactic level include temporal clauses,counterfactual conditionals,interrogative and comparative sentence structures and the like.Second,the presupposition properties have been manipulated in the investigative interviews of American TV series Lie to Me in two contrastive ways to realize the function of persuasion and dig out more information and criminal evidence:normalized operation of presupposition properties such as subjectivity,unidirectivity and defeasibility,and reverse operation of presupposition properties such as appropriateness and mutual knowledge.Third,the utilization of the presupposition strategies such as tricky presetting of presupposition(i.e.presupposing something that is nonexistent or unconfirmed)and crafty borrowing of presupposition(i.e.borrowing presuppositions from the suspects’ expressions directly or indirectly)to realize the purpose of persuading the suspects to admit to their crimes.In addition,the skillful applications of Aristotle’s persuasive strategies,namely,ethos,logos and pathos from presuppositional perspective,can also be regarded as the presupposition strategies of investigative interviews,by using which the suspects can be convinced with trustworthiness,enlightened with reason and touched with empathy.In the selected corpus,it can be found that investigators tend to employ ethos to build suspects’ trust in self,logos to bring out facts and reasons,and pathos to produce in suspects an emotional resonance with self so as to realize the effect of persuasion.The present study concluded by pointing out that the research on persuasive strategies of investigative interviews from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition is of some theoretical and practical values.Its theoretical value,to some extent,lies in its effort to test the potentiality of presupposition theory’s interdisciplinary application while its practical value lies in its contribution,more or less,to the process of making the research on investigative interviews more diversified.