[HOME] [BOOKS] [ORDERING] [JOURNALS] [ABSTRACTS] [LINKS] [SPECIAL OFFERS]

Phillip Chong Ho Shon, "'Now You Got a Dead Baby on Your Hands': Discursive Tyranny in 'Cop Talk'", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law / Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique Vol. XI no.33 (1998), 303-322: This paper examines the role of language in a police/citizen encounter. I examine the "bullying talk" that is embedded in the "social talk" employed by police officers in their routine police activity. This paper can be seen as a semiotic analysis of law applied to a police communication system in that for the police officers, the traffic stop is a routine interaction, already contextualized and transformed into a meaningful symbolic code. I examine the police talk using micro-details of the conversational interaction. I compare the police/citizen interaction to a courtroom cross examination and a mediation hearing, the fundamental difference being that in a police interaction, the lack of a "neutral umpire" offers no possibility of safeguarding against abuse of power. The result is a form of linguistic abuse of power or discursive tyranny. e-mail: pshon1@uic.edu

[HOME] [BOOKS] [ORDERING] [JOURNALS] [ABSTRACTS] [LINKS] [SPECIAL OFFERS]