An Analysis Of Police Interrogation From The Perspective Of Dialogic Syntax Theory

Police interrogation discourse,as a special discourse within the public security agency system,is a typical institutional discourse.In order to ascertain the facts of the case,obtain the confession of the suspect,and collect evidence of the crime,the police will ask the suspect about the facts of the case in accordance with the relevant law.If the suspect pleads guilty or pleads not guilty,he or she will respond to the police’s questions with a cooperative or uncooperative attitude.Through the question-and-answer model,the interrogation activity can clarify the facts of the case,therefore,dialogue run through the entire police interrogation process.In the past,the study of police interrogation in the academic field mainly focused on the field of law,for example,the improvement of the interrogation system and the interrogation strategy.With the continuous development of forensic linguistics,research results on police interrogation discourse continue to emerge.Dialogic Syntax Theory was proposed by Du Bois in 2014.This theory regards the dialogic discourse as the object of analysis to explore the structural relationship between independent sentence in dialogue.And police interrogation discourse is an institutional discourse that is dominated by dialogue.Therefore,the syntactic structure of the police interrogation between the police and the suspect is worth exploring.This thesis explores the dialogic structure of police interrogation discourse from the perspective of dialogic syntax theory,and attempts to answer the following questions:(1)What is the relationship between the police’s questions and the suspect’s answers in terms of syntactic structure?(2)What types of resonance can be caused in question-and-answer pair of the police interrogation?(3)What are the motivations for resonance between the police’s questions and the suspect’s answers?After the analysis of the syntactic structure,the thesis comes to the following findings:(1)The police interrogation dialogue presents a parallel syntactic relationship between the police’s questions and the suspect’s answers;(2)The parallel structure between the question and the answer produces such resonances as focal resonance,frame resonance and zero resonance.(3)The parallelism of syntactic structure,the cooperation between the two partiesof interrogation,the different stances between the police and the suspect,and the consistency of the topic are the main motivations for resonance in police interrogation.This thesis explores the syntactic structure of the question-and-answer pair in the process of police interrogation from the perspective of dialogic syntax theory.It is expected to help the police better construct their questions during the interrogation process,strengthen the emphasis on the suspect’s answers,and quickly collect case information,so as to speed up the interrogation process,and be conducive to building a more just and efficient police interrogation discourse.