248 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
them must have been copied from the other. As the statement contains
slightly more information than the interview record, it seems reasonable to
conclude that, as Power claimed, the former was in part derived from the
latter.
In an attempt to corroborate this claim further, I took the last third of the
interview record and transformed it, as Power asserted the police officers
had done, from a question-and-answer sequence into a monologue, adding
only essential linking items and omitting anything that a fabricator would
be likely to think might seem redundant from Power’s point of view. Appendix
1, below, sets Power’s alleged confession side by side with my ‘composed’
confession. The similarities are sufficiently striking to suggest that this is
the way that the statement was created.
My colleague Michael Hoey (personal communication) used the same
argument, that in real interaction speakers do not say the ‘same thing’ in the
same words, to question the authenticity of another disputed text, this time
an interview, in which a suspect was apparently confessing to a whole series
of burglaries. He noted that no fewer than eleven replies to questions about
breaking and entering seemed to be formed on the same pattern and could
be accounted for by the following formula, where the bracketed items are
optional choices:
In real life only orators can produce lexico-grammatical patterning of this
order in real time.
Quantity
Grice (1975) in his seminal article ‘Logic and conversation’ observed that
one of the controls on speaker’s contributions was the quantity maxim,
which he summarized as:
(a) make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current
purposes of the exchange);
(b) do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
What Grice is concerned with here is the fact that all utterances are shaped
for a specific addressee on the basis of the speaker’s assumptions about
shared knowledge and opinions, and in the light of what has already been
said, both in the ongoing interaction and in previous interactions. This appeal
to what Brazil (passim) has called ‘common ground’, makes conversations