| Interviewers in criminal investigations engage suspects in forensic questioning in an attempt to transform from unsettled to settled (Kozin 2008) ‘the facts’ of events, behaviour and speech in relation to alleged crimes. In questions such as “Is that what you’re saying?” officers challenge suspects to accept a version of the preceding speech in an attempt to ‘fix’ the facts (Kozin 2008) for the record. Combining insights from previous research on reported speech (Clift and Holt 2007) and formulations (e.g. Drew 2003), we look not just at what is done in these questions - blame allocation, moral evaluation – but how actions of settling on agreed evidential facts are accomplished through the coordination of talk with bodily interaction such as gesture, gaze (where possible) and the manipulation of objects by institutional and lay speakers (pen, paper, etc). A corpus of 20 video-taped police interviews is examined. We show how institutional practices of challenging suspects to agree with versions of events are accomplished multimodally and suspects agree and resist multimodally too. Using a combination of conversation analytic and corpus linguistic methods, which help us to focus on the linguistic and non-linguistic environment of the verb ‘saying’, we show how facts or their denial are multimodally co-constructed. |
