Oral Presentation: (Not) for the record: Doing implicatures in police reports of domestic violence

Title: (Not) for the record: Doing implicatures in police reports of domestic violence

Abstract:

Conversational implicature (Grice 1975) is a pragmatic strategy used in discourse to carry meaning(s) not encoded explicitly in language. There are many reasons why explicitness is not the most appropriate route, for example, social politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). Discourse participants often make sense of utterances in everyday interactions by ‘picking up’ implicatures. This is largely achieved by recourse to relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Clark 2013). However, because meanings generated through implicatures cannot be traced back to linguistic forms they can be easily denied. They are a good vehicle therefore, for carrying meanings that discourse participants are reluctant to put on-record but wish to communicate nonetheless.

In this paper, I adopt a relevance-theoretic approach to police MG3 reports (‘Management Guidance’ reports prepared for prosecutors to obtain charging decisions). The reports summarise domestic violence cases. All of the cases in the reports resulted in non-prosecutorial discharge decisions (i.e. a ‘simple caution’). I examine a) the ways in which investigating officers and their police gatekeepers present case information through implicature; b)  how receivers (police and prosecutors) can use relevance to derive additional meanings from the reports; and c) the potential impact of inferential information on case outcomes. Finally, I argue that some implicatures (and their cooperative recovery by institutional agents) can be regarded as constituting victim-blaming (Lynn and Canning 2021), and by extension, reflect institutional misogynistic ideologies about domestic violence crimes.

References:

Grice, H. P. (1975). ‘Logic and conversation’. In Speech acts (pp. 41-58). Brill.

Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage, volume 4. Cambridge University Press.

Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell Press.

Clark, B. (2013). Relevance Theory. Cambridge University Press.

Canning, P., & Lynn, N. (2021). ‘Additions, Omissions, and Transformations in Institutional ‘Retellings’ of Domestic Violence cases’. Language and Law, 8(1): 118.