Forensic linguistics, or the study of language and the law, is a growing field of scholarly and public interest. Yet books on the subject have predominantly been introductions to the field or aimed at summarizing its applications, often with a focus on a single aspect of the legal system. The Discourse of Police Interviews aims to further the discussion by focusing exclusively on how police interviews are constructed and used to investigate and prosecute crimes. The first book to focus exclusively on police interview dialogue, The Discourse of Police Interviews examines leading debates, approaches, and topics in contemporary police interview research. Among other topics, the book explores the sociolegal, psychological, and discursive framework of popular police interview techniques employed in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as PEACE and Reid, and the discursive practices of institutional representatives like police officers and interpreters that can influence the construction and quality of linguistic evidence. Together, the contributions situate the police interview as part of a complex, and multistage, criminal justice process. Despite the role of discourse in potentially shaping legal outcomes, the use of linguistic analysis to understand the legal process is yet to be fully and uniformly embraced, and the book will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields, such as linguistic anthropology, interpreting studies, criminology, law, and sociology.

Forensic linguistics, or the study of language and the law, is a growing field of scholarly and public interest. Yet books on the subject have predominantly been introductions to the field or aimed at summarizing its applications, often with a focus on a single aspect of the legal system. The Discourse of Police Interviews aims to further the discussion by focusing exclusively on how police interviews are constructed and used to investigate and prosecute crimes. The first book to focus exclusively on police interview dialogue, The Discourse of Police Interviews examines leading debates, approaches, and topics in contemporary police interview research. Among other topics, the book explores the sociolegal, psychological, and discursive framework of popular police interview techniques employed in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as PEACE and Reid, and the discursive practices of institutional representatives like police officers and interpreters that can influence the construction and quality of linguistic evidence. Together, the contributions situate the police interview as part of a complex, and multistage, criminal justice process. Despite the role of discourse in potentially shaping legal outcomes, the use of linguistic analysis to understand the legal process is yet to be fully and uniformly embraced, and the book will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields, such as linguistic anthropology, interpreting studies, criminology, law, and sociology.

This volume responds to a growing interest in the language of legal settings by situating the study of language and law within contemporary theoretical debates in discourse studies, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics. The chapters in the collection explore many of the common occasions when those acting on behalf of the legal system, such as the police, lawyers and judges, interact with those coming into contact with the legal system, such as suspects and witnesses. However the chapters do this work through the conceptual lens of 'textual travel', or the way that texts move across space and time and are transformed along the way. Collectively, notions of textual travel shed new light on the ways in which texts can influence, and are influenced by, social and legal life. With contributions from leading experts in language and law, Legal-Lay Communication explores such 'textual travel' themes as the mediating role of technologies in the investigatory stages of the legal process, the centrality of intertextuality in the legal construction of cases in court, the transformative effects of recontextualization in processes of judicial decision-making, and the way that processes of textual travel disturb the apparent permanence of legal categorization. The book challenges both the notion of legal text as a static repository of meaning and the very idea of legal-lay or lay-legal communication.