Due to the multiple interactions between police forces (specialists) and other members of society (non-specialists), English for Police Purposes might intuitively appear less specialised (Petit 2010: §12) than Scientific English for instance. Nevertheless, English for Police Purposes can be considered to be a specialised variety of English located at the crossroad of forensic and legal languages, with specific linguistic (Philbin 1996; Poteet & Poteet 2000), discursive (Johnson et al. 1993; Gaines 2011; Rock 2017) and cultural (Fielding 1994; Reiner 2000; Cartron 2022 in press) characteristics that deserve to be studied in depth. Among the various methods that can be used to investigate specialised languages, genre analysis (Swales 1990: 24-27) provides an interesting insight into the specialisation of the discursive community and its practices, taking into account linguistic and extralinguistic features (Beacco 2004: 116; Bhatia 2017: 6). English for Police Purposes is characterised by a variety of genres, both spoken (police interviews, radio communications or court testimonies for example) and written (such as police reports, manuals or codes of ethics).
This paper focuses on the analysis of a specialised American police discourse genre based on a corpus of 115 probable cause affidavits. A probable cause affidavit is a sworn statement made by American police officers to state that there is probable cause to believe the defendant has committed (or is committing) a criminal offense and that the facts support the claim to make an arrest, conduct a search or seize property (Crespo 2020: 1279-1280). After briefly presenting the theoretical and methodological framework on which this study is based, the presentation intends to show how police officers use specific linguistic, discursive and rhetorical strategies to serve a specialised purpose (Van der Yeught 2016: 61), which is to prove the existence of probable cause to the relevant legal authorities (police superior, district attorney, judge or other actors in the judicial process). Police officers use diverse discursive devices to inform but also – and perhaps more importantly – to convince their audience.
References
Beacco, Jean-Claude. 2004. "Trois perspectives linguistiques sur la notion de genre discursif". Langages 1/153, 109–119.
Bhatia, Vijay K. 2017. Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Practice. New York: Routledge.
Cartron, Audrey. In press. "A Study of the Psycho-Social Functions of Humour in English for Police Purposes". In Isani, Shaeda & Michel Van der Yeught (eds.), ESP and Humour. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Crespo, Andrew Manuel. 2020. "Probable Cause Pluralism". The Yale Law Journal 129, 1276–1391.
Fielding, Nigel. 1994. "Cop canteen culture". In Newburn, Tim & Elizabeth A. Stanko (eds.), Just Boys Doing Business? Men, Masculinities and Crime. London: Routledge, 46–63.
Gaines, Philip. 2011. "The Multifunctionality of Discourse Operator Okay: Evidence from a Police Interview". Journal of Pragmatics, 43/14, 3291–3315.
Johnson, Edward, Mark Garner, Steve Hick & David Matthews. 1993. PoliceSpeak: Police Communications and Language and the Channel Tunnel – Report. Cambridge: PoliceSpeak Publications.
Petit, Michel. 2010. "Le discours spécialisé et le spécialisé du discours : repères pour l'analyse du discours en anglais de spécialité". E-rea 8/1. DOI: 10.4000/erea.1400
Philbin, Tom. 1996. Cop Speak: The Lingo of Law Enforcement and Crime. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Poteet, Lewis J. & Aaron C. Poteet. 2000. Cop Talk: A Dictionary of Police Slang. Lincoln: Writers Club Press.
Reiner, Robert. 2000. The Politics of the Police. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rock, Frances. 2017. "Recruiting Frontstage Entextualisation: Drafting, Artefactuality and Written-ness as Resources in Police-Witness Interviews". Text and Talk 37/4, 3–38.
Swales, John M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van der Yeught, Michel. 2016. "A proposal to establish epistemological foundations for the study of specialised languages". ASp 69, 41–63.
