'For the record': applying linguistics to the production of English police interview records

Description

This paper presented the preliminary findings of a pilot project conducted collaboratively between AIFL’s centre for research on Spoken Interaction in Legal Contexts (SILC) and an English police force, which applies linguistic research to the process of producing written transcripts of investigative interviews with suspects (ROTIs). This process is of particular importance since these are evidential documents, routinely presented in court as part of the prosecution case, yet the original spoken data are (necessarily) substantially altered through the process of being converted into written format (Haworth 2018; see also e.g. Bucholtz 2009; Cook 1990; Fraser 2003). Our aim is to develop methods of reducing this routine interference with interview evidence.

Period	14 Sept 2021
Event title	15th Biennial Conference of the International Association of Forensic Linguists
Event type	Conference
Degree of Recognition	International