The Choice Of Question Types And Sentence Structures For Information Transmission In Police Interrogation

The present study is conducted on the questioning strategies used in police interrogation. It attempts to explore how the interrogator chooses proper question types and sentence structures to transmit information effectively to realize the specific interrogatory intentions. After reviewing the previous studies, the author adopts the presupposition theory as the theoretical framework. Based upon some contributions done to the presupposition theory by some scholars, the author build an analytical framework to analyze how the interrogator choose question types and sentence structures to transmit information.Information exchange between the interrogator and the suspect is a dynamic process which involves two steps of making choices. The thesis first analyzes how to choose the question types from a repertoire of yes/no question, WH-question, either/or question, and tag question, and then it analyzes how to choose the proper sentence structures from a repertoire of cleft-sentence, topic sentence, and inverted sentence, etc. As a supplement, this thesis also analyzes how to exert the textual constraint on the chosen structure in order to overcome the weakness of pure syntactic research. The textual means employed herein include the structural identity and cohesion. To be more objective in the present study, the author also conducts statistics of the frequency of each sentence structure in police interrogation.This thesis finally provides a tentative model as the guideline for interrogators on how to choose proper question types and sentence structures in order to transmit information more effectively.