A Relevance-Theoretic Approach To Police Interrogations

Based on Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory,this thesis provides a descriptive survey of police interrogations(PI),focusing on how police question suspects and make inferences from suspects' answer,which thus ensures effective and legal police interrogations.Interview logs are used as the materials for the research.Police interrogation is a kind of verbal communication between police and suspects and it is also a kind of institutional talk dominated by police.D.Sperber and D.Wilson's Relevance Theory (RT) views communication as ostensive-inferential.Ostension and inference are two sides of the same coin,referring respectively to the addresser's production and the addressee's interpretation of the same utterance.This process aims at achieving contextual effects which result in the addresser's communicative intention resorting to ostension,combining the contextual assumptions.In the ostensive-inferential communication of PI,inference is involved in the police's comprehension and processing of suspect's utterances.As is known,the purpose of PI is to ascertain and confirm the facts.To fulfill their goals,police,on the one hand, must acquire the legal perceptual and inferential abilities and study cognitive environments of the suspect.On the other hand,as the result of the goal-conflicted relation between police and suspects,the confrontation exists in the whole process of PI. Therefore,police use the ostensive language like "you have to confess the facts to our questions" and "confession is the best policy for you" to make manifest the intention to convey information to the suspect that he has no choice but to confess the facts.It is argued by some scholars that RT is still subjective and problematic to obtain the maximal relevance and optimal relevance by means of intuition in the "comparative judgment".But the findings from the research show that the utterances between police and suspects are related to criminal facts.The author continues speculative exploration for the interrogation tactics of PI.Hence,it can be claimed that Crime-based Relevance Principle,which is designed to enhance the professionalism of law enforcement officers,is the application of RT to legal utterances.It is one that forensic pragmatists face:an adequate theory of legal utterance interpretation must answer it.The findings of the study might offer a new perspective for PI and be of help to law enforcement officers who wish to better understand suspects' utterances,effectively ascertain the facts of a case and avoid false confessions by torture.However,based on Sperber and Wilson's claim,relevance itself is always relevant to an individual,so all the analysis is open to discussion.