Analysis Of Implicature In The Interrogation Room

ANALYSIS OF

IMPLICATURE
IN THE
INTERROGATION
ROOM

ABSTRACT
The title of my project is Analysis of implicature in the Interrogation room. I intend
to analyze the way people, in this case witnesses or suspects, use the language during an
interrogatory and see how they follow the sense of cooperation that is required. For this
matter, I chose to analyze different scenes from a criminalseries called Castle, an
American TV show in which a mystery novelist, Richard Castle, shadows a NYPD
detective, Kate Beckett, on her investigations, affording him the opportunity to use his
knowledge and skills to help solve murders. These scenes allow analyzing the different
linguistic strategies that the characters use in the interrogation room and how they
manage to give only the amountof information they want to generate an implicature
that save them from getting arrested.

IN T R O D U C T IO N
When we communicate something, we are generally not aware of what resources
we use for the listeners to understand the message we want to express. In most
occasions, elements like context or the relationship between the participants in the
conversation determine the way in whichthose participants speak and moreover
contribute to the way they are understood by the hearers.
For instance, there are cases in which the way you say things communicate more
than what you really say, or other cases in which the information not said communicate
more than the utterance itself. In those cases, the speaker expects that the listener will
be able to figure out, on the basis ofthe previous knowledge, the additional meaning
that the words uttered can have. This additional meaning is called an implicature and it
is an example of more being communicated than is said. In order to interpret them, the
participants in a conversation must first assume that some sense of cooperation is
working through the interaction.
There are, however, some occasions where speakers may notfollow the
expectations of this cooperation, such as in courtrooms, classrooms, or interrogatory
rooms. During interrogations, witnesses and suspects may not follow the linguistic rules
hold in conversation. The police and detectives know this fact because, although they
may think that the possible person of interest is truthful and cooperative, they still have
to operate under the assumptionthat they are lying. So, in these circumstances the
cooperative principles that must rule an interaction change, as the assumption is not that
the speakers will be reliable but the contrary, they will be uncooperative and untruthful.

G R IC E ’S T H E O R Y O F IM P L IC A T U R E
An implicature refers to what is suggested in an utterance even though it is not
expressed or strictlyimplied by the utterance. This suggestion is generated by the
relationship between sense and force, that is, between what speaker says and what the
words uttered mean. Because there are times when people say exactly what they mean
but most of the times they are not totally the opposite.
Grice’s theory is an attempt at explaining how a hearer gets from what is said to
what is meant, from the levelof expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning
(Thomas 1996: 56).
Sometimes the implicature is carried by the lexical items themselves regardless of
the context, but most of the times the additional meaning of the sentence arises only in a
particular context of utterance. Grice referred to them in Logic and Conversation as
conversational implicatures, implicatures which are “connectedwith certain general
features of discourse” (1975: 45). As these implicatures might be arbitrary, it is posed
the question how the hearer get from what is said to what is implied. Grice noticed that
when engaged in a conversation people follow a set of purposes and share cooperative
efforts in order to be understandable. They follow a general principle that Grice labeled
as Cooperative...