Interactional management of claims of insufficient knowledge in police interrogations in English.

Abstract: Claims of insufficient knowledge, such as I don’t know or no idea, are observable in a variety of contexts in spoken interaction. This discourse analytic study focuses on how six murder suspects in police interrogations formulate claims of insufficient knowledge and what spoken strategies police officers employ in responding to them. The data consists of audio-recorded transcripts of six police interrogations carried out in English, which resulted in a corpus of 170 115 word tokens, featuring 287 claims of insufficient knowledge in total, with the most frequently used one being I don’t know. Six different strategies of how police officers manage claims of insufficient knowledge were identified. The study also provides examples of the interactional outcome of the strategies utilized. The findings reveal that close-ended questions were deployed twice as much as open-ended questions, even though open-ended questions usually result in more informative responses, which one would expect to be a goal of police interrogations.