Analysis of Police-Suspect Discourse at the Field of Forensic Sociolinguistics

The first purpose of this essay is to introduce forensic sociolinguistics and its usages in forensic discourse analysis. Forensic sociolinguistics is a new branch of applied linguistics related to the law and legal processes of society. In this field of scientific study, it is believed that social factors should be considered in analyzing discourses in forensic context. The second purpose is to recognize the police-suspect discourse structure and to survey the role of police in this discourse. To do this, 15 discourse events of police interviews in forensic situation of Tehran have been surveyed analytic-descriptively. To analyze the data, the pattern of study suggested by Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson(2007) in analyzing interviews of English speakers has been utilized; therefore, a descriptive framework for analyzing forensic discourse of Persian speakers are prepared. The results of this research show that in interviewing, police have a particular version of events in mind that they are attempting to confirm; they persuade suspects to confess. Therefore, police-suspect discourse in forensic situation has goal-oriented interview structure. Social functions of language which are introduced in functional linguistics help police achieve their forensic goal which is to elicit a voluntary written confession from suspects.