Linguistic recontextualization of police interrogation: a new approach in Forensic Linguistics

Abstract

Forensic linguistics is a discipline coordinated with legal goals in the judicial system, focusing on all branches of linguistics including phonetics, semantics, discourse etc. This science is not so known in Iran; where as, it can have a lot of applications in judicial system. The author aims to show how linguistic tools can help to rebuild the police interrogation. In Iran, it is common a police interview is changed into a written form. It brings some problems like the accused one denies what has been written later in front of a judge that he has not said that so. Having observed more than 50 live cases in courts and police stations, the author draws this conclusion that linguistic parameters like semantic tools (meaning of verb), syntactic tools (mood of verb), discoursal tools (power relation)… can be effective to recontextualize the police interrogation.