Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis

250 Advances in spoken discourse analysis

A: The detectives and I beat you up and C.I.D. they denied, they didn’t

beat you up and you cannot do anything because you got no proof.

In a less extreme form we can see the same phenomenon of over-explicitness
in the extract below, taken from a police interview which the accused claimed
was totally fabricated; these particular utterances, as well as including an
admission of guilt, introduce quite naturally to the Court otherwise inadmissible
information about past misdemeanours:

K: I didn’t mean to kill anybody you know. Fucking stupid to do it

with my foot like it was.

Pc: You’re talking about your injured foot?

K: Yes.

Pc: You alleged someone had shot you in a drugs deal sometime

before this Dixon’s job.

K: I don’t know if I said that but I had my toes shot off in

Newtown.

The second sentence of K’s first contribution is at least formed in a convincing
way— ‘with my foot like it was’ appeals to shared knowledge which is not
made explicit. By contrast, the policeman’s contributions are over-informative:
if, as the text implies, the police officer already knew about K’s problem with
his foot, he would have been much more likely to agree with the first assertion,
contributing something like ‘It certainly was’, or ‘Why did you do it then?’;
if, on the other hand, he really needed clarification about the significance of
the foot in the murder, he would probably have asked ‘What do you mean,
your foot?’ He does neither, but instead makes explicit the shared knowledge.
The policeman’s second contribution is even odder in the context; why should
he tell K something they both know? These utterances are clearly, in Grice’s
terms, ‘more informative than necessary’ and the simplest explanation is that
they were designed for the overhearer/Court and not the co-participant.
Over-explicitness can be realized at nominal group as well as at clause
rank. In the Power confession already referred to, there was frequent reference
to ‘white plastic (carrier) bags’:

Walker was carrying...two white plastic carrier bags

Hunter was carrying three white plastic carrier bags

Richard was carrying one white plastic carrier bag

Walker gave me one of the white plastic bags

Hughie gave J.Walker his white plastic bag

It is highly unlikely that Power would have used the phrase, ‘numeral +
white + plastic + carrier + bags’ even once. Firstly, it represents a degree
of detail we do not see in the rest of his statement. Secondly, the detail does
not seem to have any importance in the story as he tells it, and it is very
unusual for narrators to provide detail which has no relevance to their story.
Thirdly, it is a noted feature of speech that speakers do not normally produce