This paper examines narratives told in police interviews through a case-study approach with three interviews from a small corpus of twenty. The interviews are conducted by different police interviewers in different parts of England. Narratives given by suspects in initial storytelling episodes are examined along with negotiating activity that develops from this start point. We see how lay narratives are transformed into institutionalized and evidential ones and how content is reshaped through negotiation that challenges and transforms narrative material. Negotiations over role, responsibility, resistance, participation, and assessment of evidential value of story elements occur. This activity sometimes recontextualizes (Sarangi 1998; Linell and Sarangi 1998; Iedema and Wodak 1999) and transforms the start-point narrative, giving it evidential value; that is, value in relation to institutional and generic goals of establishing the facts of an alleged crime, for use in any future trial. Transformation is therefore seen as a negotiated (re)construction and recontextualization of narrative detail, part of the (re)productive work of institutional talk that produces an altered reality and responsibility that orients to the institututional rather than individual perspective.
A great deal of the caring work of nursing is accomplished and mediated through language. This paper attempts to characterize some of this language in quantitative and stylistic terms in an attempt to characterize the genre of nursing report language. Nursing students (n = 26) and graduate nurses (n = 3) viewed a videotape of a person being interviewed by a psychiatrist and produced written reports. These showed a large proportion of words relating to the person and to feelings and needs, compared to existing databases of the English language in general. The language produced by the participants also contained many modal or modifying words and is similar to spoken rather than written English in terms of the proportion of lexical content. There was much diversity in their descriptions and the vocabulary used to refer to the client. Graduate nurses showed more scepticism of the evidence provided by the video and advocated more investigation and questioning of the client. The use of standard forms and techniques of expression suggests that these reports were assembled on a language production line. Finally, we advocate a more systematic approach to educating nursing students about the power of the language they use.
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