Verbal Strategies in Interrogation Interaction (An Investigation in Legal Discourse)

During the interrogation process and its discourse language contains certain characteristics that can be the source of many linguistic researches and studies. One of the most important issues that can be mentioned in the interrogation process is how to evolve the verbal communication by the interrogator in order to obtain the truth of the interrogee’s statements. In this regard, the interrogator uses strategies to advance the discourse in his/her own way. In analyzing the data, the participants in the interrogation interaction were divided into two groups of specialist and non-specialist. The first category are the people who are familiar with the law and the legal language and include the police, judge, lawyer, etc. On the other hand, the second group are people who are not familiar with the law (or at least have little familiarity), including the accused, the plaintiff. In the present essay, based on the corpus of ten litigation files and based on the analysis of the verbal interaction between the expert (judge) and the non-expert (the accused, the plaintiff), we attempted to extract the various strategies used by the interrogator. The strategies include question formulation, use of repeated questions, quotation clauses, contrast,the use of the phrase "khob" as a discourse maker and interruption.