A Discoursal Approach to Categorising Questions in English Legal Settings

This study is an investigation into questions in English legal discourse. It attempts at categorizing questions in varied police and court interviews. Such interviews are considered to be a speech event in which questions are discrete speech acts grouped into act sequences. It is found that questions involve six broad categories arranged according to how far they restrict witnesses in their answer. They are given in order from the least restrictive to the most restrictive.