On The Interpersonal Meanings Of Police Interrogation Discourse In The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Police interrogation is a requisite legal process granted to the police by law.It has been intensively studied in legal,social and psychological perspectives.How to assure the procedural justice of police interrogation is one of the significant issues in the field of law.Meanwhile,police interrogation is also a speech event where the police interrogate the suspects in compliance with the law.The assurance of procedural justice could not be achieved without a concern of language.However,linguistic studies on the Police Interrogation Discourse(PID)have long been overlooked in China.This paper is motivated by the concern of what can be done to contribute to the justice assurance by studying the PID in a linguistic perspective.In this paper,we mainly attend to answering the following questions: 1.What are the interpersonal meanings contained in the PID? 2.By what language devices and strategies are they achieved? 3.How do the police maximize the procedural justice by adjusting the interpersonal meanings during interrogation? By answering these questions,this research attempts to provide regulatory suggestions on the language use of the police and on the maximization of integrity in this judicial procedure.Theoretically,this research is conducted with the engagement system of the Appraisal Theory under the paradigm of Systemic Functional Grammar.It constructs a customized theoretical framework for the interpersonal meanings study of the PID by combining the features of the PID and the engagement system,which enriches the application of the engagement system to the PID.The data of this research is the police interrogation records of five cases collected from the local Intermediate People's Court.Under our framework,we study the interpersonal meanings of the PID on the level of lexis,clause and discourse and find that the police use different language devices to achieve different interpersonal meanings,either convergence or divergence.On the level of lexis,the legalese and formal words are more likely to realize the dialogical contraction and achieve divergence.On the level of clause,the Mood system is usually used to adjust interpersonal meanings.There are generally three moods in the PID,interrogative,imperative and declarative.Imperatives and the pragmatic transmutation of interrogatives are often employed to deliver orders,warnings and accusations,presenting divergence,whereas the bare imperatives which show the police's concern for the suspects and declaratives as the Police Cautions are convergence-oriented.On the level of discourse,the two-move exchange structure is more likely to deprive suspects of the dialogic space to defend for themselves,realizing divergence,whereas the three-move structure acknowledges the response by the suspects and encourages them to talk,realizing convergence.We argue that it is conducive to the assurance of procedural justice when the police employ the language strategy of dialogical expansion and be convergent in the police interrogation.All together,there are five chapters in this paper.Chapter One,introduction,presents the research motivation,provides the working definition,comes up with research questions,explicates the research significance,justifies the data,describes the methodology and at last illustrates the layout.Chapter Two reviews the development of Forensic Linguistics and previous studies on the PID both at home and abroad.Previous studies mentioned in Chapter Two shed much light upon Chapter Three where we construct the theoretical framework for the analysis of interpersonal meanings in the PID.Chapter Four analyzes the interpersonal meanings of the PID in the data under the theoretical framework provided in Chapter Three.It discusses the interpersonal meanings and the language devices to realize them at three levels,namely lexis,clause,and discourse.It answers the research question No.2 and No.3 by interpreting the different interpersonal meanings in different cases and referring to the current police interrogation regulations.In Chapter Five,we draw a conclusion and offer suggestions concerning the maximization of procedural justice in police interrogation.Limitations and recommendations for future studies are also presented here.