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P :
Because I would like to know who I'm talking to before I can talk with
you—what you just indicated, that you might have physically abused
someone.
S :
[Stares blankly.]
P :
Do you understand what I'm saying?
S :
Yes, I do, but that you would like it, well...[Shrugs.] Are you going to tell
me something about yourself as well or...? [Shakes head.]
P :
Well, I don't know, would you be interested in what I would have to say?
S :
No, but I also don't understand why you would be interested in me.
In the above fragment, the suspect gives snappy replies to the police officer's
questions. This is a first indication that she is not trying to cooperate: she seems to
have a very opposed stance to the officer, his approach and his proposals. With her
behaviour, the suspect also expresses disapproval (negative approval), repeatedly
shaking her head and shrugging, indicating that she does not agree with the police
officer or just does not care. Moreover, Mrs Wassink goes a bit beyond simply
disagreeing, as she seems to intentionally annoy the police officer. She does this
by questioning the police officer's approach (repeatedly asking of what use it is), by
expressing that she does not understand what is going on, and by asking a counter-
question to the police officer (whether he will say something about himself as well).
Here we see that an opposed stance, negative approval, and an annoy strategy occur
together.
We found several other relations between concepts from the theories we used that
occurred less frequently in our collection of factors. On some occasions, the police
officer, but mostly the suspect, used a confront strategy which was accompanied by a
dominant stance and negative approval. In these cases, the suspect was trying to lead
the conversation by confronting the police officer(s) with his or her own opinions
(which were negative in nature most of the time). Another striking co-occurrence of
concepts is that of the concepts underlying rapport. As Tickle-Degnen and Rosenthal
( 1990 ) assert, coordination, attention and positivity generally occur together to form
the feeling of rapport and this is confirmed by our observations.
16.5.2
Concept Dynamics
Our approach to analysing the corpus of police interviews hinges on the annotation
of short fragments. However, our annotation did not capture the dynamic aspects
of the interviews, for example how and why people change stances or how their
feelings of rapport increase or decrease. Here, we illustrate how this may work by
describing a change in a situation in the Van Bron scenario (see transcript below)
in terms of the concepts from Table 16.6 . In this case, the suspect is asking the
police officers their name and surname in a dominant way. One of the police officers
immediately agrees to give his surname, but the other only gives his first name.
To this the suspect replies by making a small gesture with his hand, implying that
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