MANIPULATIVE PRAGMATICS OF INTERROGATION
MANIPULATIVE PRAGMATICS OF INTERROGATION

Summary/Abstract: The research focuses on pragmatic and linguistic means of manifesting the communicative roles of interrogators (an investigator and an interrogated person) in interrogation discourse. The paper identifies the characteristics of preferred and dispreferred roles of the communicators from viewpoint of manipulative interactions and interrogation efficiency. Preferred roles are marked by compliance with cooperative maxims, the use of positive and negative politeness strategies. In dispreferred roles, an investigator applies mitigated directives and invectives with the illocutionary force of discrediting an addressee. Dispreferred operative roles of an investigator rely on a set of pragmatic devices, including conversational implicatures, manipulative presuppositions as a means of manipulation, the intended flouting of the maxims of cooperation, acts of "threat" to “the face” of an interrogee. Dispreferred roles of an interrogee are marked with lexical-syntactic forms of negation, adverbs-intensifiers of the degree of negation or ignorance, adverbial deintensifiers of the speaker's confidence in the reported information, elliptical structures, rhetorical questions with illocution of negation that affect the semantic and formal-structural characteristics of the interrogation: preferred roles aimed at achieving the global or local goals of the investigator are supported and encouraged, while dispreferred roles may drastically change the course of interrogation in order to achieve the desired (preferential) speech response.

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