Pragmatic Implications of Yes/No Interrogatives in the Written Statements of Malaysian Investigative Interviews: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

An investigative interview constitutes a setting of high-risk interactions between institutional participants, who act as questioners, and lay participants who provide information. This distinct asymmetry in power relations and control within the interaction leads to an interest in the examination of the strategies investigative officers use to achieve their institutional goals during investigative interviews. This study draws on the IO-Det corpus, which comprises 8,635 words from 11 written statements based on investigative interviews conducted within the Malaysian Immigration Department. Taking an inductive approach, a corpus-based forensic discourse analysis was applied to analyze the formal characteristics of yes/no questions in the IO-Det corpus. Tsui’s (2002) framework for eliciting functions of questions was used to examine the sociopragmatic functions of yes/no questions in written statements. The collocation analysis identified the do you know interrogative as the most frequent pattern of yes/no questions in the IO-Det corpus. The results indicated that, through the eliciting functions of informing, confirming, and establishing agreements, do you know interrogatives performed actions, such as seeking information, checking knowledge, confirming, gaining admissions, and establishing an offense. This study sheds light on the variation in questions used in recording written statements, which serve as a significant piece of evidence representing witnesses in the legal system.