2007.police interrogation

8/3/2019 2007.Police Interrogation

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/2007police-interrogation 1/37

http://das.sagepub.com

Discourse & Society

DOI: 10.1177/09579265070754772007; 18; 337Discourse Society

Elizabeth Stokoe and Derek Edwardscomplaints and police interrogations

`Black this, black that': racial insults and reported speech in neighbour

http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/18/3/337 The online version of this article can be found at:

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Discourse & Society Additional services and information for

http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://das.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/18/3/337Citations

by Malgorzata Suszczynska on October 18, 2008http://das.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts


http://das.sagepub.com/subscriptions



http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav


http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav


http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/18/3/337

http://das.sagepub.com/




http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/18/3/337







Stokoe and Edwards: Racial insults and reported speech 337A R T I C L E

Discourse & Society Copyright © 2007SAGE Publications

(Los Angeles, London, New Delhiand Singapore)

www.sagepublications.comVol 18(3): 337–372

10.1177/0957926507075477

‘Black this, black that’: racial insults and reported speech in neighbour complaintsand police interrogations

E L I Z A B E T H S T O K O EL O U G H B O R O U G H U N I V E R S I T Y , U K

D E R E K E D W A R D SL O U G H B O R O U G H U N I V E R S I T Y , U K

A B S T R A C T We examine the location, design and uptake of reported

racial insults and abuse across two interactional sites: telephone calls to

UK neighbourhood mediation centres and police interviews with suspects in

neighbourhood crimes. In the mediation data, talk about ethnicity and racism

was formulated almost exclusively in ‘reported speech’, as a listed complain-

able item about neighbours rather than as the reason for the dispute. In the

police data, suspects reported racial insults as counter-complaints against

other parties, and police officers quoted insults reported in witness testimony

as part of their interrogation. We found systematic, oriented-to practices

for constructing and reporting racial insults, involving pairing national or

ethnic identity categories with another word (for example, ‘Paki bastard’,

‘gypsy twat’, ‘bitch Somali’). Although speakers often ‘edited’ insults (‘nigger

this’, ‘white that’), they nevertheless maintained two-word formulations,

indexing the swear-word and stating just the ethnic or national category.

Speakers further oriented to the ‘two-wordedness’ of racial insults in their

carefully managed use of one-word formulations. Insults regularly contained

locative phrases (for example, ‘fuck off back to your own country’) and

generalizing devices (for example, ‘and stuff ’). Finally, we found a continuum

of response types, from explicit second assessments done in ordinary talk, to

minimal but aligned acknowledgements in mediation calls, to no affiliative

response in police interviews. We discuss the implications of our findings

for understanding the impact and relevance of racism in everyday life, aswell as providing insights into the sorts of daily conflicts that occur between

neighbours, as these are recounted in two institutional settings.

K E Y W O R D S : conversation analysis, mediation, neighbour disputes, police

interrogations, racial abuse, racist insults, reported speech

Introduction

We examine a feature of talk common to the activity of complaining and accusing:

quoting the words of various parties to events. Quoted talk, more commonly







338 Discourse & Society 18(3)

referred to as ‘reported speech’ (RS), is the practice of reporting, directly and

indirectly, the words of other people, something that occurs in both spoken

and written talk and texts. We focus on RS as an interactional environment for

formulating racist references to persons as they crop up in a large corpus of

data, including telephone calls to neighbour-mediation services and police

interviews with suspects in neighbour-related crime. We therefore come some-

what indirectly to RS as a topic for investigation. One goal of our ongoing

research into neighbour disputes is to ground systematically a preliminary

observation about the relevance of matters of ‘identity’ – or persons and char-

acters – to disputes. For example, Stokoe (2003) observed that complaints about

noise and tall hedges sometimes featured other ‘complainables’ such as the

errant neighbour also being a ‘single mother’ or a ‘slut’. This article adds to

a growing body of work about how the identity categories of everyday life

(man, mother, child, gypsy, Indian, teacher, lesbian, etc.) figure in complaints

about ostensibly material topics (loud noise, boundaries, hedges; see also

Stokoe, 2006a).

We start with two brief examples of our phenomenon. The first comes from

a telephone conversation between a member of the public (the client, C) and a

mediator (M) at a mediation centre in the north of England. The client has been

recounting the first in a series of complaints, about her neighbour blocking

access to a public alleyway. The second example comes from an interrogation

between a police officer (P) and a suspect (S), recorded by the police as a routine

feature of interrogation, in the Midlands region of England. The suspect has been

arrested for criminal damage to his neighbour’s car, and the fragment occurs

toward the end of the interview.

EC-9 (simplified transcript)

C: It is th- this is the first story. And then she started

to break my fence,

M: Ah.

C: she started to uh...assault me, insult me verbally, and every

→ minute uh, “go home you blah blah bloody Paki”M: AHHH.

PN-59 (simplified transcript)

P: Right. I don’t think there’s anything else I want to ask you

John.

S: Okay. Thank you very much.

P: Is there anything else you want to add.

S: Yeah I would like you to investigate him for racist remarks

→ against my family, calling them “Paki bastards”.

In both examples, a member of the public is reporting the racist remarks of others

to a professional representative of an institution. Both the client and the suspect







Stokoe and Edwards: Racial insults and reported speech 339

are the targets of the alleged comments, and are reporting them as part of a

complaint about an absent third party. Both speakers are engaged in interactions

in which the evidential basis, or credibility, of their version of events, rather

than the other parties’ version, will have consequences for future institutional

action. Our aim in this study, therefore, is to examine the practices involved

in reporting racist abuse across these different settings. We address questionsabout how racist insults come to be produced, what their occasion and action

orientation is, how they are conventionally designed, how they are responded to

by recipients, and what sorts of concepts about race are constructed in and

through them. More generally, we aim to develop understandings of everyday

talk involving the social problem of racism, as well as the social identity bases

of neighbourhood conflict.

The article therefore contributes to a range of literatures. The topics of race and

reported speech have been dealt with most directly by Buttny (1997) in a series

of studies examining American students’ use of RS in informal discussions andfocus groups after viewing a documentary ‘Racism 101’. For example, Buttny

and Williams (2000) examined the students’ use of RS to ‘articulate a compel-

ling discursive position on an interracial problematic,’ and to ‘justify, frame

or account for their views on interracial contact’ (Buttny and Williams, 2000:

109–14). They further observed that students often reported the words of others

in ways that embedded a negative evaluation of them, by mocking or parody-

ing the original speaker. Buttny’s study is part of a much larger body of work

that has examined the design, placement and function of direct and indirect RS

across several disciplines, including conversation analysis, interactional socio-linguistics, narrative and literary theory, philosophy, and discursive psychology

(for an overview, see Holt and Clift, 2006).

A well-documented finding of RS studies is that RS provides a method

for giving veracity and authenticity to a descriptive account (in contrast to a

speaker’s gloss of events, or vague description). By proposing that the speaker

is simply voicing the words of another, RS makes claims more robust, as if giv-

ing recipients ‘direct access’ to an event allowing them to assess it for themselves

(Holt, 1996, 2000; Wooffitt, 1992). As Sacks (1992: 309) writes, ‘the sheer factof doing quoting can be the expressing of a position’. Others have found that RS

is common to storytelling as a way of making a story more vivid (Labov, 1972a),

or as a way of creating ‘involvement’ in it (Tannen, 1989). Holt (2000) notes

that RS is common to complaints, where it is often placed at the climax of an ac-

count and followed by an assessment from the second speaker. A related series

of studies focus on ‘reported thoughts’ (Barnes and Moss, 2007; Jefferson, 2004a).

For example, Haakana (2006: 151) shows how narrators of complaint stories

present ‘the reported thought as a silent reaction to a co-conversationalist’s re-

ported turn-at-talk’, as a way of showing that they had a problem but were wise

enough not to voice it.

A second aim of this article is to contribute to studies of complaining andrelated activities such as defending, mitigating, and accusing. These activities

are central to our institutional sites of data collection, including telephone calls

to neighbour-mediation centres and antisocial behaviour helplines, and police








interviews with suspects accused of crimes such as harassment and criminal

damage to neighbours’ property. Again, there is a large literature that focuses

on both spoken and written complaints, structural and organizational features

of direct complaints made against the talk’s current recipient(s), and indirect

complaints made about someone or something else to a third party (Dersley and

Wootton, 2000; Drew, 1998; Laforest, 2002; Stokoe, 2006b; Stokoe andHepburn, 2005). A large subset of complaint studies examines how something

is produced as a ‘legitimate complainable’ (Pomerantz, 1986), often via various

practices of objectification including ‘script formulations’ (Edwards, 1994) in

which specific events are offered as instances of generalized, recurrent pat-

terns; extreme case formulations (Edwards, 2000; Pomerantz, 1986), and the

invocation of category-based knowledge entitlements (Potter, 1996; Whalen

and Zimmerman, 1990). Edwards (2005) has studied the way speakers display

and manage their subjective investment – or the ‘subject side’ – in making a com-

plaint. Relevant to the current article, Schegloff (2005: 452) has recently notedthat ‘the complainability of some form of conduct can be contingent on the

identity of the agents and the recipients of the conduct – identities often grounded

in category memberships’ (see also Stokoe and Edwards, forthcoming a). We focus

on the way the ‘social problem’ of neighbour conflict involves categorizations

of persons in courses of action.

RACIAL INSULTS AND TALK ABOUT RACE

A useful way of understanding our topic is as an ‘insult’. As the client in our

first example above says, ‘she started to uh . . . assault me, insult me verbally, andevery minute uh, “go home you blah blah bloody Paki”’. Early sociolinguistic

work on insults focused on routinized or ‘ritual insults’: extended rounds of

insults comprised of formulaic phrases, done competitively and often seen as

characterizing all-male or black male culture (Abrahams, 1976; Leach, 1979).

For example, Labov (1972b) distinguished between ‘ritual’ and ‘personal’ insults.

Whereas a ‘ritual’ insult contains something obviously implausible about its

object, and so gets responded to with another similar insult, ‘personal’ insults

are regarded as being unambiguously plausible with regards to the object, andmay lead to conflict. More recent work has demonstrated that similar kinds of

routinized insults are common to many population groups other than black

males, and Labov’s distinction between ‘ritual’ and ‘personal’ insults has been

challenged. Kochman (1983) argues that whether an insult is literal or a tease

depends on the uptake of recipients. In our own brief example, having reported

the racial insult, the client goes on to say that she is not from Pakistan and

her neighbour knows that. So although she treats the insult as ‘personal’, the

insulting term is simultaneously ‘ritualized’ or arbitrary for the person who

produces it.

In one of the few detailed studies of racial insults, Guimarães (2003) investi-

gated a corpus of walk-in complaints to police at a police station in Brazil, andstudied the post-hoc written reports produced by officers. Guimarães found that

racial insults could be grouped into one of seven categories of ‘social separation’,

including: ‘the simple naming of the Other, so as to recall the social distance or








justify an interdiction of contact’; ‘animalization of the Others’; and ‘invocation

of physical or mental deficiency’ (Guimarães, 2003: 139). Guimarães also

paid some attention to racial insults reported in complaints about longstand-

ing disputes with neighbours (the second highest context about which complaints

were made):

This fact, together with the physical proximity of the parties, results in dis-

putes more charged with emotion, which overflows in verbal virulence. The

victim’s sexual morality, humanity, hygiene, and physical defects, and the in-

convenience of being neighbors to the victim, are all targets of verbal attack.

(2003: 146)

Some of the insult terms are similar to ones we report later in this paper (forexample, ‘black bitches’, ‘dirty niggers’), occurring in similar kinds of disputes

about noisy children or blocked passageways between houses. However, unlikeGuimarães’s study, which analyses third-party reports of people’s complaints,rather than the complaints as they were actually made at the police station desk,this article focuses on reports of racial insults in their live, sequential contexts,done as part of other activities in negotiation with an institutional recipient. Ourarticle is therefore one of only a handful of studies that examine insults as theyare occasioned and organized in sequences of talk-in-interaction (Evaldsson,2005; Goodwin, 1990).

In addition to the specifics of racial insults, the current article makes a con-tribution to the broader literature on discourse and racism, talk about ‘others’

and the practices of prejudicial categorization. Much of this literature focuses onthe language of ‘new racism’ (Barker, 1981), a term that refers to the subtle andcovert forms of expressed prejudice that contrast with ‘older’ forms of blatantracism. There are two clear subsets of discourse analytic research, both of whichtend to focus on the language of ‘elites’ or majority ethnic groups. One subsetexamines the representation and construction of minorities (or ‘the Other’) inpublic texts of various kinds such as government policy documents, speeches,broadcast programmes, letters, websites and newspapers (Billig, 2001; Rapley,1998; Sales, 2005; Van Dijk, 1991). A second subset comprises interview studies

of the way interviewees talk about topics such as ethnic minority groups, racism,national identity, immigration and asylum, with a main focus on the way speak-ers ‘dodge the identity of prejudice’ (Condor, 2006: 11) and deny racism throughthe deployment of a host of discursive strategies (for a recent collection, seeVan den Berg et al., 2003; see also classic studies by Van Dijk, 1992; Wetherelland Potter, 1992).

The issues of racism and racist talk are often regarded as somewhat elusivein terms of their ‘capturablity’ for research and analysis. As Van Dijk (1987: 18)

suggests, it would:

be a very inef ficient way of collecting data when we would record hundreds

of hours of talk in order to get perhaps a few hours of talk about ethnic

groups . . . Finding data . . . would amount to a search for the proverbial

needle in the haystack. (Van Dijk, 1987: 119; see also Burkhalter, 2006)








As a data-gathering source, then, interviews are clearly advantageous asthey enable researchers to collect guaranteed ‘content’ about their researchquestions. Indeed, the same observation can be made for any substantivetopic of conversation, where the researcher’s interest is topic driven. However,and notwithstanding disclaimers about the ‘naturalness’ or ‘informality’ of

conversational interviews and focus groups, information gathered in interviewsis very often treated as ‘surrogates for the observation of actual behaviour’(Heritage and Atkinson, 1984: 2). From interview studies, then, we learnlittle about how talk about ethnicity or racism occurs in everyday life becauseinteractions are inevitably guided by the researcher’s topics and agenda, andby the nature and context of interviewing itself, as a form of social interaction.

In a recent article, Hansen (2005: 63) argues that ‘there is a paucity of scholarship that expressly considers how ethnicity is utilized by participants asa resource in conducting the business of, and in attending to myriad exigencies

in, social interaction’. McKenzie (2003: 462) similarly points out that discourseanalytic work on ‘new racism’ often overlooks both the ‘essential question of howracism itself features as an accountable matter in everyday talk’ as well as ‘therange of interactionally consequential business that participants pursue in thecourse of negotiating the relevance of racism to the events and circumstancesthey discuss’. Our use of a large corpus of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction,and our focus on live reports of everyday troubles involving racism, thereforecontrasts somewhat with work on discourse and racism to date. A central aim of this article is to open up new avenues for the study of racism, in which there is a

systematic focus on some of the moments in people’s lives where they do happento talk about such topics, and on their methods for doing so.

Data and method

Our UK data set1 comprises approximately 125 hours of neighbour disputeinteraction: 20 neighbour mediation sessions; 230 telephone calls to mediationcentres; 170 telephone calls to environmental health departments; 30 calls toantisocial behaviour helplines; and 122 police interrogations of suspects. The

data were collected in four different regions, three of which have the largestminority ethnic communities in the UK according to the 2001 Home Officecensus. The analysis presented here draws mainly on the mediation calls andpolice interview subsets of our data, as this is where matters of racism mainlyarose. The data were collected for an ongoing project on neighbour disputesand identity, studied as part of everyday social action and situated practices.Names and other person-identifying features of the talk have been altered. Alldata were transcribed to basic typist level, with selections further transcribedaccording to Jefferson’s (2004b) system for conversation analysis (CA). Ourapproach is conversation analytic, drawing heavily on CA’s principles of turn

design, action formation, and sequence organization, as well as discursivepsychology’s compatible concerns with ‘the close, mutually implicative natureof subject–object relations, as a managed feature of discourse of various kinds’(Edwards, 2005: 6).









The analysis is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the place-

ment of reports of racial abuse in the mediation calls and police interrogations.

Second, we analyse the design and composition of the racist insult and reported

speech itself. Third, we compare the responses of call-takers, suspects and police

officers to those reports.

SEQUENTIAL ENVIRONMENTS FOR REPORTING RACIAL INSULTS

Extract 1 comes from the mediation centre telephone call introduced at the start

of this article. The client (C) and her neighbour have been involved in an eight-

year dispute. C has been recounting to the mediator (M) her ‘fi:rst *↓story.*’2 in

a series of complaints about the neighbour blocking access to a public alley-way

between their houses. This fragment occurs approximately seven minutes into

a 20-minute call.

Extract 1 EC-9

(0.2)

C: It is th- this is the fi:rst *↓story.*=and

then: .hh she started to- breaking my n- uh: : :

fence, .hh she [start ]ed to: .hh uh: : : : :=

M: [Ah:. ]

C: =Assault me: =insult me: .hh <verbally,> .hh (.)

→3 an’ ev:ery minute uh- (.)↑go ho : me you bl-

→ ↑go ho:me you blah blah (0.2) <bloody Paki>

(0.3)

A basic observation about the target utterance, ‘↑go ho:me you bl- ↑go ho:me

you blah blah (0.2) <bloody Paki>’ is that it is delivered as direct reported speech,

occurs in a stretch of narration, and is one item in a list of three complainablethings that C’s neighbour has allegedly done (blocked access to a public alleyway

and broken C’s fence). C connects the different items in her list as an escalating

series of events (‘and then:.hh she started. . .’), such that the verbal insult figures

as the third item reported to the mediator, rather than as the initial, primary or

sole reason for the complaint.

Extract 2 provides another example in which we see the RS racial insult ap-pearing not as the reason for the dispute, or for phoning the mediation service,

but as one item in a list of troubles. The client is complaining about loud noise

from a neighbour’s parties, and this sequence occurs approximately threeminutes into a 35-minute call.

Extract 2 EC-13

M: So [you would’ve like her to: ( ) let you know.] =

C: [ .hhh yeah of course uh: the ] =

M: =[ y e a h. ]C: =[courtesy:]

(0.2)

C: Courtesy knock that we↓ar : e havin’ a par-=bu’ > i-









i- i-< it wasn’t as if it was a <party:> (.) jus’

every ye:ar for a birthday or anything, .hhh it’d

be party near enough every other mo:nth.=kinda

thing.

((17 lines omitted on the topic of party noise))

C: But as [when she first initially .hh ]hh when sheM: [ O: :kay not recently. ]

C: → first got in, .hhhhh but we did ’ave racial abuse

C: in Jan- in December.

(0.3)

C: .hhh

(0.2)

C: An’ a coupla times: since then . . pt . . hhh

M: Ye- racial abuse.

C: Yep.

M: °H:mm.°(1.1)

C: Uh: >I- I-< I’m Asian: : my Wes- my [wi:fe is] West

M: [Right. ]

C: Indian:

M: ↑Oh: o- [okay. (Mm.) ]

C: [.hhhh um: : ]

(0.9)

C: → Um: uh such as (.) Paki family: etcetera hhh

Again, note that the complaint about ‘racial abuse . . . Paki family:’ follows initialreports of other troubles. In none of our examples do callers complain about

‘racial abuse’ as first business. There are several possible explanations for this

observation. First, we might surmise that the ‘alleyway’ and ‘fence’ (Extract 1),

or noise from parties (Extract 2), are displacements or preliminaries; that the

disputes are actually, and fundamentally, about race, and it is because the callers

and their neighbours identify themselves as members of different ethnic groups

that they have disputes about alleyways and noise. Another explanation is that

all reported issues are relevant ‘causes’ of the dispute, and it is by chance rather

than design that the racist incident is reported second or third, rather than first.A third explanation is that the dispute is ‘actually’ about the material issues of

blocked alleyways and damaged fences, and that if these problems had not arisen,

there would be no occasion for the racial abuse, nor for the complaint about it.

And a fourth possibility is that, given that callers are speaking to a mediation

service about problem neighbours, their reports of noise and vandalism display

an orientation to what is institutionally appropriate. Whatever the explanation,

Guimarães (2003: 140, emphasis added) suggests that:

racial insult can occur during conflict or, on the contrary, can give rise to conflict: Itcan be a weapon of last resort; it can be the first trump card played. What motivates

the racial insult and the order in which it appears in the conflict are, then, decisive elements

for analysis.









Reports of racial insults in mediation calls, then, appear in narrative accountsand are done in the service of complaining about the neighbours. In the policedata, reports of racial insults appear in one of two environments. The first isclosest to that seen in the mediation data, illustrated in Extracts 3 and 4 below,where suspects report racial abuse directed toward them by the alleged victim

of the crime for which they have been arrested. These reports are not bound up,legally at least, with the reason for the suspect’s arrest. Extract 3 comes from aninterview with a suspect (S) who has admitted assaulting his neighbour witha bar ‘in self defence’ following a noise dispute. S has been describing eventsleading up to and during the assault. Extract 4 comes from the end of a policeinterview in which the suspect has been arrested for criminal damage to hisneighbour’s car.

Extract 3 PN-100

(0.7)P: An’ then you hit him with a ba: r.S: Yeh. cos e’s grabbing me (.) tryin’ a (0.4) do

whatever he wants to do. ’n: (.) whatever I don’t

know. Bu’ I just had to get ’im off me.(0.7)

P: M [m

S: [Then u:m (0.8) th’others started chasing me upthe *roa:d an’ that with *baseball bats really jus’

→ yellin’ loads of racial abuse ’n (0.4) *then they-

(0.3) t’u:h (0.3) tried breaking in me hou:se. Ic’d hear them sayin’ let’s get in his fuckin’ hou:se.Let’s rape his fuckin’ daughters.hhh etcetera

→ etcetera, .hhh nigger this: nigger that, (0.4) coon

→ this coon that, (0.5) and u:m (0.8) cos that’s whenI ws- I ws standin’ at the top of the roa:d an’ that.

(0.3)

Extract 4 PN-59

(1.8)

P: .pt ↑Right >I don’t think there’s anythin’ elseI want to ask you< uh (.) Joh [n.

S: [*O:kay.

(.)

S: °Thank [you very ↑much.°P: [Is there anythin’ else you wanna add . . hh

(0.2)

P: Any- (0.2) .h [( )]S: [Ye:h I] would like you to investigate

him.

(0.2)S: → fo:*:r (.) racist remarks. against my family:h.

(.)

S: → Callin’ them <Paki bastards.>

(0.6)









In Extract 3, the police officer (P) is eliciting and formulating S’s account of

events leading up to the assault, and S’s report of ‘racial abuse’ is occasioned in

this narrative context. In Extract 4, the report of ‘racist remarks’ features as a

new topic in the interview, and follows a move by P toward its possible closing (‘.pt

↑Right >I don’t think there’s anythin’ else I want to ask you< uh (.) John.’). S’s

responses align with this course of action (‘*O:kay’, ‘°Thank you very hmuch.°’).As P hears S’s reply, she produces an invitation to add further testimony (‘Is there

anythin’ else you wanna add..hh’). This invitation, partly through its placement

in overlap, is done as routine, as not expecting a response that will open up the

closing sequence with new business. After receiving no immediate response

from S, P reformulates the question, which S then answers with his request

for a counter-investigation based on his report of racist remarks. But despite

P’s ostensible invitation to S to launch a new topic, it is not pursued beyond its

acknowledgement, and P makes a successful move to close five turns later.

One feature common to Extracts 1–4 is the speaker’s explicit characterizationof what kind of thing the upcoming reported speech is an instance of. So, in

Extract 1, C prefaces the RS by categorizing its action: ‘=Assault me:=insult me:

.hh <verbally,’ (C is a non-native speaker, and repairs ‘assault’ with ‘insult’). In

Extract 2, C reports that his family ‘did ’ave racial abuse’, and the suspects in

Extracts 3 and 4 similarly categorize the other party’s actions as ‘racist remarks’

or ‘racial abuse’ before providing a specific instance. In this way, the listener is

provided with an interpretative frame or category for the RS that follows – it is to

be heard as racial abuse rather than, say, a personal insult, bad language, or fit of

temper. It is also a way of invoking the other party’s character as a particular typeof person: the kind of person who is prejudiced, and whose behaviour is a prod-

uct of their disposition rather than the situation (Edwards, 1995). This mitigates

the reporter’s own agency in, and accountability for, the course of actions being

investigated or mediated. Furthermore, foregrounding the action category

before providing an example – that is, doing it as the ‘headline’ to be picked up

by recipients (as in Extract 2, ‘Ye- racial abuse.’) – has potential legal–criminal

ramifications, particularly in the police context.

Besides suspects’ reports of racist remarks, one further environment for RSis in quotes from witness statements. Suspects arrested for one type of offence

may be questioned about making racist comments as part of that offence, which,

if they admit to it, would result in being charged with a more serious (‘racially

aggravated’) crime. In addition, in two of 122 neighbour-related incidents, sus-

pects were arrested for ‘racially aggravated harassment’. Extracts 5 and 6 are

extracts from these two latter interviews.

Extract 5 PN-71

(0.9)

P: → She will shout things like: (1.0) _ 4you Paki

→ bastards I hate you._

(0.3)

P: _Fucking get ou:t of here._

(1.0)









S: (mm-hmm) (nothin,’)

P: An’ she’s sayin’ (that’s been happenin’ now)

(0.2) basically just t- since you moved in.

(0.3)

S: Ri:ght.

Extract 6 PN-114c

P1: Mo:vin’ on from that we’re gonna play you some

extracts of: (0.6) um: a tape recordin’ of who we

believe to be you, >an’ then we’re gonna< ask you

(0.2) quickly to ↓comment on them.(0.8)

P2: I’m not sure what kind’f uh: (2.2) qualitythey’re goin’ to be?

S: Well it’s obviously only gonna be my voice an’

nobody [e:lse.P1: [We’re gonna ask you to comm- (0.2) (go

yeh.)(0.4)

((tape starts playing – sounds like recording ismade outside with children playing in thebackground))

S?: → ( ) ((sing song voice)) <↑↑PLEA:SE MISTER→ POLICE MAN (0.7) I <O:NLY WA:NT AN IN: :DIAN>→ WO:G. (0.3) ALL I WANT’S A FUCKI:N’ WO:G (0.3) I

→ DON’T WANT NO WHI:TE ONES,(1.8)

P2: → Okay that’s please mister police man I only→ want an Indi:an wog, (0.4) or a lovely: (.)→ Indian wog. (0.4) I don’t want no whi:te ones.

(1.2)S: ( ) sound nothin’ li:ke it.=an’ who said tha:t.

(0.2)P1: You.

(0.2)P1: Was that you say [in’ ( )]S: [That’s not] ↑m: :y: voi:ce,

(that- didn’t even) under↑sta:nd ↓that.

In Extracts 5 and 6, the police officers are quoting from neighbours’ witnessstatements. The quoted racial insults are ‘_you Paki bastards I hate you._ (0.3)

_Fucking get ou:t of here._’ and ‘I <O:NLY WA:NT AN IN::DIAN> WO:G. (0.3)ALL I WANT’S A FUCKI:N’ WO:G (0.3) I DON’T WANT NO WHI:TE ONES,’. InExtract 6, the police officers are playing a surreptitious recording of, allegedly,the suspect actually saying the remarks for which she has been arrested.

In contrast to the way police suspects and mediation clients in Extracts 1–4pre-categorize other party’s action as insults or racial abuse, consider the extractsbelow, in which police officers put witness testimony containing RS racial insultsto suspects.









Extract 7 PN-62

P: .pt Uh : : Carol then says that you said to her: (0.5)“Fuck off: (.) <_you fucking white whore.”_>

(0.5)S: → No : : I didn’t say anything raci:st,

Extract 8 PN-83

P: [. . .] the ↑chap (.) who’s got the- (0.5) uh : (0.2) ↑blonde

hai:r has sa:id (1.0) to the lady (0.2) “why don’t you go

back to your own country.”(1.3)

P: .shih “you bitch: Somali.”

(0.4)

((4 lines omitted))

P: Who said that then.(0.2)

S: → Not me: I never said o:ne racist word I could

[ s: :wear my mother]’s life I never=

These extracts show how we can locate and empirically demonstrate:

the effects of tacit orientation to categories . . . [and] . . . zero in on interactional

participants’ orientation to the complainability of what they themselves or another

participant has done without benefit of an overt complaint in the interaction in which

to ground the claim. (Schegloff, 2005: 474)

Unsurprisingly, suspects generally deny the implied category of ‘racism’.

However, although police officers’ questions deal with the factual status of the

witness testimony, they do not move to categorize or evaluate those words as

‘racial abuse’ from their perspective. Rather, the suspects display, in their denials,

what they take to be the relevance of the RS in the current context of a policeinterview.

In Extract 7, S treats ‘white’ as the ‘raci:st’ word to deny, leaving ‘fuck off’,

‘fucking’ and ‘whore’ not denied, indeed not attended to at all. By means of formulations and omissions, S produces precisely what she (purportedly) said,

in ways that counter the implication that she was being racist rather than

merely abusive, or abusive on any other criterion. Similarly, in Extract 8, S

selects ‘Somali’, rather than ‘bitch:’ as the ‘o:ne racist word’ to deny. These de-

nials display suspects’ understanding of what makes a crime of harassment

more serious in English law (i.e., when ‘racially aggravated’), whereas there is

no specific legal prohibition against swearing or calling someone a ‘whore’ or

‘bitch’. These particular denials may also reflect the hierarchical organization of

a culture’s categories, as well as which ones are sayable in which contexts. In this

setting at least, the gendered categories ‘whore’ and ‘bitch’ need not be denied.

In this section we have described the basic environment in which reports

of racial insults occur. In calls to neighbourhood mediation services, complaints

about racial abuse are formulated within reported speech, itself part of a wider








narrative account of troubles. In police interviews, in addition to being ac-

cused of racist insults when the police quote witness testimony, suspects may

themselves report racial abuse as a way of countering, mitigating or excusing

the actions for which they have been arrested. Having done this basic descriptive

work, we now move on to consider in more detail the construction of racial abuse

within turns at talk.

FEATURES OF RACIAL INSULTS IN REPORTED SPEECH

What features of the person formulations done within RS produce it as racist

abuse? As we have observed, speakers sometimes preface their report with a

categorization of it as racial or racist abuse. More specifically, however, we investi-

gate the design and composition of the reported racial insults themselves, to try to

understand how they are treated as unambiguously abusive. We found that such

phrases are almost always produced by juxtaposing two or more words, often a

swear-word, which colours and makes offensive the ethnic or national category to

which it is tied. We return in Extract 9 to the mediation call introduced earlier.

Extract 9 EC-9

(0.2)

C: It is th- this is the fi:rst *↓story.*=and

then: . hh she started to- breaking my n- uh: : :

fence, .hh she [start ]ed to: .hh uh: : : : :=

M: [Ah:. ]

C: =Assault me:=insult me: .hh <verbally,>.hh (.)

→ an’ ev:ery minute uh- (.) ↑go ho:me you bl-

→ ↑go ho:me you blah blah (0.2) <bloody Paki>

(0.3)

The reported talk in this extract shares many prosodic and design features

observed by Holt (1996) and others (Klewitz and Couper-Kuhlen, 1999), which

work to distinguish it from other kinds of utterances: C uses the direct address

form ‘you’, she pauses before she launches the reported material, and does an

intonational shift with elevated pitch on ‘go’, all of which help the recipient tohear this as direct reported speech, particularly in the absence of a quotative

marker. C slows down as she says ‘<bloody Paki>’, and her tone is hearably

imitative. It is not clear whether C is attempting to reproduce the ‘original’

rhythm and intonation of the words, or whether these features merely func-

tion to mark out the words as someone else’s and not hers (and, of course, RS

is often produced as if it were imitative, even when it is caricatured). But these

prosodic features allow the caller to convey an assessment or evaluation of the

reported material: she is indignant; it is a bad thing. As Holt (1996) points out,

RS is often designed to do implicit rather than explicit assessments of the reportedutterance, such that by making things sound, say, offensive, speakers can invite

their recipients to draw the same conclusion. Relatedly, Schegloff (2005: 450)

comments that:








a key component of social problems is to be found in the stance taken up by mem-

bers of a society toward various types of persons and various types of conduct . . .

“Stance” is one way in which values are em-bodied in interaction; understanding

how stance comes to be deployed is, then, one place to look if we are to understand

the moment-to-moment development of problematic situations.

With regard to RS, stance, and its intonational embodiment, there is often a

difference between how mediation clients versus police officers in interrogations

‘voice’ the racist language of others. This is evident in the extracts below (longer

versions of these extracts appear elsewhere in this article).

PN-71

P: → She will shout things like: (1.0) _you Paki

bastards I hate you._

(0.3)P: → _Fucking get ou:t of here._

PN-114a

P1: As I came to the front door: : you shouted (0.3)

→ _fucking Pakis:_

PN-114c

P2: → Okay that’s please mister police man I only

want an Indi:an wog, (0.4) or a lovely: (.)Indian wog. (0.4) I don’t want no whi:te ones.

The police officers do some vocal work in marking out the RS as such; withsome combination of overt prefaces (for example, ‘you shouted’), pausing before

launching the RS, or doing intonation shifts such as emphasizing the first word

uttered. However, unlike mediation clients, police officers typically deliver RS with

a designedly unanimated tone of voice. Of course, they are reading from written

testimony and not reporting direct observations of events. However, this kind of

delivery seems particularly marked at the point at which they recite the racial

abuse. For example, the phrases ‘She will shout things like:’ and ‘As I came to the

front door::’ are also part of the reported testimony, but they sound different from

‘_you Paki bastards I hate you._ (0.3)_Fucking get ou:t of here._’ and ‘_fuckingPakis:_’. In the third example, as we noted in the previous analytic section, the

police officers have played a recording of the suspect (allegedly) shouting and

singing racist things to her neighbour. But when they repeat the highly animated

words from the tape, they do not attempt to reproduce that delivery. Instead, they

flatten the pitch range, lower the volume and reduce the emphasis – as well as

somewhat revise the actual words (cf. Linell and Jönsson, 1991). One possible

function of this practice is to avoid an embedded assessment of the actions beingindirectly reported, and to display neutrality and fact-orientation with regard

to witness testimony, in contrast (as we saw in Extract 9) to speakers’ reports of insults said directly to them.









A striking feature of the racial insults in our data is their two-word formu-

lation (‘<bloody Paki>’), comprising a national identity category paired with a

conventional swear-word. ‘Paki’,5 an abbreviation of ‘Pakistani’, is the most com-

mon racial insult found in our data (for example, ‘fuckin’ Pa:ki’, ‘Paki bastards’).

Extract 10 provides a second example of this ‘two-word’ method for producing

abuse as racial abuse, and comes from a police interrogation. Here, the policeofficer is reading from a witness statement. The suspect has been arrested on

suspicion of criminal damage.

Extract 10 PN-83

P: .shihhhhhhhh ↑and (1.2) the- ↑chap (.) who’s got

the- (0.5) uh : (0.2) ↑blonde hai:r has sa:id

(1.0) to the lady (0.2) ‘why don’t you go back

to your own country.”

(1.3)P: → .shih “_you bitch: Somali._”

Extract 10 contains the same kind of two-word formulation we observed inExtract 9 (‘‘bitch: Somali.’) and elsewhere in the article: ‘<Paki bastards.>’,‘nigger this: nigger that’, ‘coon this coon that,’ ‘IN::DIAN> WO:G.’, ‘FUCKI:N’ WO:G’, ‘_fucking Pakis:_’. Guimarães (2003) suggests that it is throughreiterating a group’s name alongside words for ‘despicable characteristics’ thatwe produce racial insults (for example, ‘black bastard, shameless black, worth-

less black’). The two-word formula thus provides a grammar for generatingnew insults; ‘Paki bastards’ being much more familiar to us, at least, than themore novel (and unique in our data) ‘bitch Somali’. There may be nothing sig-nificant in the word order here, ‘bitch Somali’ rather than ‘Somali bitch’, bothof which are grammatically possible, in contrast to adjective–noun inversionssuch as ‘Paki fucking’ or (in English) ‘black worthless’. As Silverman (2001)points out, following Sacks (1992), studying categories and the words with whichthey co-occur is important in understanding issues of social control, and has ex-tensive implications for the way racism and sexism are locally achieved.

The next five extracts further illustrate the occurrence of the two-word com-

position of racial insults that we have observed above.

Extract 11 PN-100

S: I c’d hear them sayin’ let’s get in his fuckin’ hou:se.

Let’s rape his fuckin’ daughters.hhh etcetera

→ etcetera, .hhh nigger this: nigger that, (0.4) coon

→ this coon that, (0.5) and u:m (0.8) cos that’s when

I ws- I ws standin’ at the top of the roa:d an’ that.

Extract 12 PN-101S: [...] all of a sudden his front window’s flew open a:nd

his (.) wi:fe or his girlfriend’s looked out the

window an’ gone . h (0.3) Why’re what you (.) fucking









→ sayin:g you gyppo this, you’re an Irish twat’n then h

(0.2) I shouted something back [...]

Extract 13 EC-58

C: [She (might-)] >I mean< she’s been botherin’ me, troublin’

→ me, (.) go back where I come from: black th:is:

Extract 14 EC-13

C: [...] hhh uh: I mean her child has said to my children

um: : (1.2) am I allowed to tell you what they said?

→ Or- uh- <effing:> (0.2) coolie kids: .hh don’t

→ know what you’re looking at and stuff like that?

Extract 15 EC-21

C: [...] she ha:s made racial abuse to me.=she’s called me

→ a wh:ite this a whi:te that, (0.7) an’ stuff: like an’

no:w I think it’s gone too fa:r.

Extracts 11–15 demonstrate a regular feature of the two-word formulations:

replacement of the swear-word with a pro-term or euphemistic form: ‘nigger

this: nigger that,’, ‘gyppo this,’, ‘black th:is:’, ‘wh:ite this’, ‘<effing:>’. That is,

although still producing the insult as direct reported speech, in each case its

specifically abusive content is ‘edited’ by the speaker. One thing that reporting

the racist language of other people does, particularly in cases where speakersare the recipients of that language, is to invite their interlocutor (the person

taking the call, or the police officer interviewing them) to make inferences about

the producer of the racist language. As we noted earlier, this locates the root

of the complaint or dispute in that other party, and not in the caller or suspect,

which is particularly relevant in the many cases where there are complaints,

counter-complaints, and a history of conflict. Speakers ‘editing’ of reported

speech – replacing swear-words with pro-terms such as ‘this’, ‘that’, or ‘effing’ –

works additionally to characterize the abuser as using abusive language as such,

rather than saying any words in particular. It also reflects indexically on thecurrent speaker as reluctant to use such terms themselves, at least in the current

context, in contrast to the neighbour who uttered them. In the following by-now

familiar extract, the caller explicitly provides such an identity-relevant upshot

in the final lines of the sequence.

EC-9

C: [...] “go ho:me you bl- you go home you blah blah (.)

<bloody Paki>

(0.3)

M: ↑Ah: [hh.

C: [I’m not Pakistani .=. hh [An(h)d she knows ]

M: [£Yeh.£ uHhh yeh. ]









C: that.

(0.2)

C: A [nd: .hh ] even in the court she said n- °“I

M: [ Ohh. ]

C: I know that they are not Pakistani° but then

I’m angry I’m sorry I said something *likethis.*”=.hhh↑and.hh I sa- I tol- I- and day I

to:ld her. .hh “look at yo:u. you are living

with a <black> (0.2) *u-* ↑gu:y.

(.)

C: [And you are telling me: *uh-* “go home bloody

M: [M:m.

C: → Pak:i?”.hhh what is- what- what kind of person

→ you are. (.).hhh

(0.2)

That C’s neighbour is categorizable as someone living with a’<black> (0.2)*u-* hgu:y.’ works to raise the complainability of her conduct: the neighbour’sincumbency in the category ‘mixed-race couple’ obliges a lack of prejudice. C’saccount therefore forges ‘a link between the complainability of the conductand the category membership of those implicated in it – whether amplifying orqualifying that complainability’ (Schegloff, 2005: 453). Following the reportedinsult ‘go ho:me you bl- you go home you blah blah (.) <bloody Paki>’, C statesthat she is ‘not Pakistani’ ‘and she [her neighbour] knows that’. This turn is

delivered with a ‘smiley’ tone of voice and laughter particle, which M joins inwith. These features display C’s stance toward, being called a ‘bloody Paki’ whenyou are not Pakistani, as ironic. Her account illuminates the everyday workingsof prejudice: her neighbour’s insult displays an indiscriminate lack of interestin the specifics of C’s nationality, even when she apparently knows better. Thelaughter particles and smiley voice also manage what Edwards (2005) calls the‘speaker-indexical nature of complaints’. When doing complaints, speakers riskbeing heard to be ‘moaning’, or that they are motivated to make the complaint,where what they say can be taken as information about them the speaker, the typeof person they are, rather than as information about the object of their com-plaint. One way of handling the ‘subject side’ of complaints is to embed themwith laughter.

That speakers edit but maintain two words in their reports of racial insults isindicative of the oriented-to, conventional method for designing them. ConsiderExtract 16, which comes from a police interrogation of a suspect arrested forracially aggravated harassment of her neighbours. In this case, of course, theprecise words used are a key evidential feature of the alleged offence.

Extract 16 PN-114a

P1: D’you u:se the word Pakis.

(1.3)

S: → I probably say- (0.6) bla:ck (0.2) ba-(1.0)









S: → Bee if you wanna ↑say ↑it?

(1.0)

P1: → Black what. black ba:stard.

(1.0)S: (Was you ↑↑there?)

(0.4)

It is evident from P’s question that some words such as ‘Paki’ (cf. ‘nigger’) are

pejorative even when unaccompanied by other adjectives. But after a long

delay, S replies that she ‘probably’ says ‘bla:ck (0.2) ba-’, in a turn littered with

perturbations: S is having trouble producing the admission. After the cut-

off on ‘ba-’ (presumably the start of ‘bastard’) and another gap, S produces

a euphemistic abbreviation of ‘bastard’ by uttering the letter that starts the

word, ‘bee’. This displays S’s understanding of what conventionally makes acategory ‘black’ into a term of racial abuse, rather than a word for ‘just’ doing

description.In the following sequence, near the start of a call to a mediation centre, note

the absence of a swear-word accompanying the national identity category.

Extract 17 DC-65

1. C: Next door nei:ghbour. (0.7) um : : (0.2) .hhhhh is : :

2. → >Indian.<

3. (1.6)4. C: I’ve no: problem with Indians: bu’ unfortunately he’s

5. >lower caste< so he doesn’t do any work.6. (0.2)7. C: An’ that’s not ra:cist.

8. (0.4)

9. M: pt. What so: (0.6) ((tape pitch squeal))

10. wha’ has him [being Indian got to- do: ]=11. C: [W- the prob- the problem is, ]=

12. M: =[with it then.]

In our corpus of over 400 telephone calls, Extract 17 is unique in that the

caller begins his complaint with an ethnicity category, ‘>Indian.<’. There is nopaired second word – the term is offered as simple ‘description’. However, notethe pauses, hesitation, delay, and speeded-up delivery of the actual category,indicating trouble in C’s first turn (lines 1–2). After a long gap (line 3) in whichthere is no uptake from M, C produces a turn that accounts for his first, displayinghis understanding that he is possibly being heard as racist, something that hethen explicitly denies following a further absence of response from the mediator(lines 6–7). At lines 9–12, M challenges the relevance of C’s categorization of his neighbour, and the call (about car parking problems outside their houses)proceeds without mentioning ‘Indian’ again.6

The implications of using single or two-word formulations are demonstratedparticularly well in the following example, taken from Tannock’s (1999) analysisof teenagers’ ‘insulting routines’ in a neighbourhood youth theatre group. Hereis a segment from Tannock’s data.









Extract 18 Tannock (1999: 329)

280. David: She looks like- (1.3)

281. Amy: Well at least I don’t look like a monkey like you do,

282. hihih, a skinny [monkey, ( ) a baboo::n, hihih.

283. David: [((David approaches to strangle

284. Amy))285. David: So, was that a racist- racial remark, huh? ((now

286. choking Amy))

287. Amy: N(hh)o, you just- ghgh- let g(hh)o. ˙hhh. I didn’t

288. say you were a black monkey, I just sai(hh)d you

289. we(hh)re a monkey.

Tannock describes Amy as a white, upper middle-class female and David as a

black, working-class male, and identifies Amy’s ‘monkey’ insult as ‘a critical

moment during the insulting routine’ (1999: 332). David’s response is to produce

a candidate categorization of Amy’s turn as ‘a racist–racial remark,’ formulated

as a question. But what is particularly interesting is Tannock’s observation that

Amy’s denial works on the basis that she ‘could not have been racist because

she had not said that David was a “black monkey”’ (1999: 333, emphasis added).

For us, this demonstrates the power of two-word formulations to be treated un-

ambiguously as racist, whereas one word might plausibly be doing some kind of

personal insult. Of course, this is not to deny that ‘monkey’ is a familiar term of

racial abuse, notable in the ‘monkey chants’ used against black football players

(see also Extract 23 below). Indeed, it is its availability as a stand-alone racial

insult that makes Amy’s denial both possible and disingenuous. Our observation

concerns the role of two-word insults as a resource that Amy is able to use in

doing that denial.

Two final components of the racial insult that crop up regularly are locative

phrases and generalizers. Here are some examples. Extracts 19 and 20 come

from calls to mediation centres, Extracts 21–23 are from police interviews, and

Extract 24 comes from a call to an antisocial behaviour officer (connected to

the police).

Extract 19 EC-9

C: Assault me:=insult me: .hh <verbally,>.hh (.)

→ an’ ev:ery minute uh- go ho:me you bl- you go

home you blah blah (.) <bloody Paki>

Extract 20 EC-58

C: [She (might-)] >I mean< she’s been botherin’ me,

→ troublin’ me, (.) go back where I come from:

black th:is:

(0.4)

Extract 21 PN-71

P: “She will shout things like: (1.0) you Paki









bastards I hate you.”(0.3)

P: → “Fucking get ou:t of here.”

Extract 22 PN-83

P: .shihhhhhhhh ↑and (1.2) the ↑chap (.) who’s gotthe- (0.5) uh: (0.2) ↑blonde hai:r has sa:id

→ (1.0) to the lady (0.2) “why don’t you go backto your own country.”

(1.3)

P: .shih “_ you bitch: Somali._”

Extract 23 PN-114a

P1: Um: they ’ave both made comments: includin’ (0.4)

→fuck off: back (0.2) to your own country, this isour count:ry, (.) monk:eys?

Extract 24 AC-6

C: =I’ve caught them >kickin’ the ball on the

roof.<=.hhh they ha:ve done um: a little bit

of: graffiti cos there’s an Indian ta: :keawaynext door an’ [when I] spoke to him about it

A: [Ri:gh’]

C: an’ .hhh and he’d actually had on his: (0.4)

→ um: : on his wall <go home Pa:kis,>

First, each extract contains a locative phrase, ‘↑go ho:me’, ‘go back where I comefrom:’, ‘get ou:t of here.’, ‘go back to your own country.’, ‘fuck off: back (0.2)to your own country,’ and ‘go home’. The very juxtaposition of these six ex-tracts shows the idiomatic nature of such phrases, and their reality-constitutingstatus, used to exclude the recipient of the insult from membership of the unsaidbut implied standard national identity ‘English’ or ‘British’. This kind of racialinsult, with its locative phrase, is designed precisely for the practices of power,exclusion and segregation. At the same time, they are instances of ‘banal nation-alism’ (Billig, 1995), done in mundane ways in which even their recipients donot make much of them. This ordinariness is important in the perpetuationof racist assumptions and practices: ‘the more natural, taken-for-granted andtherefore invisible the categorization work, the more powerful it is’ (Baker, 2000:106–11).

Second, we found that many of the reports of racial insults (in which thereporter is also the recipient) contained some kind of extender or generalizer (forexample, Jefferson, 1990; Overstreet, 1999) indicated below in bold typeface.

C: Um: uh such as (.) Paki family: etcetera hhh

S: Let’s rape his fuckin’ daughters .hhh etcetera

etcetera, .hhh nigger this: nigger that,









C: <effing:> (0.2) coolie kids: .hh don’tknow what you’re looking at and stuff like that?

C: a wh:ite this a whi:te that, (0.7) an’ stuff:

C: go back where I come from: black th:is:

(0.4)

M: ↑↑Oh: : [↓h, (yeh) ]

C: [An’- an’ all this ] ↑no:n↓sense.

These components regularly (although not exclusively) occur at clause-final

position, and serve to generalize what the person delivering the insult has

allegedly said; that is, the RS is being offered as one instance of many things

within the same category of action. They also give a sense of the particular kindof ‘stuff ’ it would be if it were spelled out in detail. Interestingly, generalizers

do not appear in police officers’ quotes from witness testimony, presumably

because witnesses do not accuse suspects of calling them a ‘Paki family etcetera’.

In the case of witness testimony and its reproduction in police interrogation, the

preferred practice is to cite precise words said, as documented evidence, rather

than to gloss or generalize them. Thus the absence of generalizers from some in-

stances of reported racial insults is evidence of the way speakers fine-tune their

accounts for the specifics of the interactional, and institutional, context.

In this section, we have analysed the component features of racial insults asthey are formulated in RS. A striking finding is the production of insults via anoriented-to practice of requiring two words to make an insult, partly evidenced

by speakers maintaining two-word constructions even when editing the swear-

word out and leaving the national identity category in (which, of course, is

central to hearing what type of verbal abuse it is). In the final section of analysis,

we examine responses to reports of racial insults, and compare the unfolding

sequences in mediation calls and police settings.

RESPONDING TO REPORTS OF RACIAL ABUSE

What kinds of response might we expect when someone tells a story in whichthey are the recipient of insults? Writing about everyday conversation, Holt

(1996, 2000) has shown that RS, which contains implicit evaluation, is nor-

matively followed by a (more) explicit second assessment. Extract 25 comes from

a telephone call between two women. Lesley is complaining to Joyce about an

absent third party, who has reportedly said something mildly insulting to Lesley.

Lesley uses RS in her first turn, to formulate what was said:

Extract 25 Holt: C85:4:4–5

1. Les: AND uh ↑we were looking rou-nd the ↓sta:lls ’n poking

2. about ’n he came up t’me ’n he said Oh: hhello Lesley,

3. (.)↑still trying to buy something f ’nothing,

4. ( ): .tch!

5. Joy: .hh [hahhhhhh!









6. Les: [↑.hhohhh!7. (0.8)8. Joy: Oo [ : : : ]: L e s l e y ]9. Les: [↑Oo:.]ehh heh ↑heh ]

10. (0.2)

11. Joy:↓

I:s [n ’ t] [↓

he12. Les: [↑What]do ↑y[ou ↑sa↓:y.13. (0.3)14. Joy: ↓0h isn’t he ↓drea:dful.15. Les: °eYe- : - : s:°16. (0.6)17. ( ): . tch18. Joy: What’n aw: :f ’l ma: : [: : :n19. Les: [ehh heh-heh-↑ eh20. Joy: Oh: : honestly, ↓I cannot stand the man it’s just21. (no [ : )

22. Les: [I thought well I’m gon’ tell Joyce that, ehh [heh ]=23. Joy: [( )]=24. Les: =[heh-heh he-e] .uh: ↑.e[h .eh↑.hhhhh25. Joy: =[0 h : : : : .] I [do think he’s dreadful26. Les: .tch Oh: dea-r27. Joy: Oh: he r [eally i] : s,28. Les: [↑He dra-]ih-he (.) took the win out’v my sails

29. c’mpletel (h) y

Holt (2000) argues that Lesley’s stance towards what ‘Mr R’ has said to her is

communicated in the prosody and turn design of the RS. Joyce’s response is totake a loud, sharp in-breath, which Lesley joins in with (lines 5–6), followed by‘Oo:::: Lesley’, which Lesley also joins in with (lines 8–9). The elevated pitch of all these turns displays indignation and shock, but note that Joyce’s responsecomes prior to Lesley’s. The RS allows Joyce to make an independent assessmentof Mr R’s words, which she develops further in subsequent turns (‘↓I:sn’ t ↓he’,‘↓0h isn’t he ↓drea:dful.’, ‘What’n aw::f ’l ma:::::n’, ‘Oh:: honestly, iI cannot standthe man’).

Holt demonstrates the regular occurrence of assessments that follow RS

in complaint stories. However, mediators and police officers respond ratherdifferently to assessment-preferring responses to RS in complaint sequences.Returning to some of our earlier extracts, we focus firstly on the mediator’sresponse to a client’s report of racial insults.

Extract 26 EC-9

1. C: It is th- this is the fi:rst *↓story.*=and2. then: .hh she started to- breaking my n- uh: : :3. fence, .hh she [star t]ed to: .hh uh: : : : :=4. M: → [Ah: . ]5. C: =Assault me: =insult me : . hh <verbally,> .hh (.)6. an’ ev:ery minute uh- (.) ↑go ho:me you bl-7. ↑go ho:me you blah blah (0.2) <bloody Paki>8. (0.3)9. M: → ↑↑Ah: : [hh.









M’s first turn of this fragment responds to the report of fence damage (line 4).

However, it does no more than acknowledge the news, and stands in sharp

contrast to his response to the reported racial insults at line 9: ‘↑↑Ah::hh.’ This

turn is delivered with initially elevated pitch, emphasis, slower pace, and a

gradual fall in pitch. It thereby adds some assessment value to what we see at

line 4, signalling M’s alignment with C’s implied assessment of her neighbour,showing that M also hears it as offensive and insulting, and something of an

upgraded complaint compared to fence damage. Note that M does not say more

than ‘‘↑↑Ah::hh.’ – he does not say, for instance, ‘Oh isn’t she (or that) dreadful’.

Mediators display an orientation to maintaining neutrality between disputing

parties (mediation with both parties being the service on offer), and so, as a

lexical item, this receipt remains verbally as evaluation-neutral as the continuers

or acknowledgement tokens (for example, ‘right’, ‘yes’, ‘mmm’) that punctuate

callers’ complaints. So although M’s turn at line 9 does something over and

above an acknowledgement, in signalling his recognition of the severity of the complaint, M does not expand the turn with an explicit assessment of C’s

neighbour. M’s response therefore passes the floor back to C and does not start

new business (see also Potter and Hepburn, in press b).

Before moving on to a second example, one thing we might consider is what

does not happen in response to the report of the ‘verbal insult’: there is no follow-

up to, or unpacking of, the content of the insult itself. Consider the following

fragment, which comes from a conversation between friends chatting as they

prepare for a night out. They have been talking about dating and the problems

that can arise if you give out, and lose, a potential date’s mobile telephonenumber.

Extract 27 VH-1

1. Emma: [...] cos Simon >went< ↑oh: : Ben got

2. someone’s nu:mber, (.) °I was like:°

3. o:h: . £no↑↑ [ : : : . £

4. Clare: [Heh ha ha

5. Emma: Oh: £well:£=

6. Sophie: =Worse thing givin’ ou:t ya number.= ↑↑never

7. ↑do ↑it.

8. (0.7)7

9. Emma: Mmm ((sounds as though eating/drinking))

10. Sophie: ↑↑That ↑↑Pete though, the- eighte:en year

11. old, (1.3) ↑he ↑text ↑me on: : the- : (0.3)

12. Thur:sday ni:ght .=at ↑↑twelve ↑↑o’clock at

13. → ↑↑ni:ght, ↑↑woke ↑me up.=↓the bastard,

14. .hhh an- (0.4) said hi: . (0.3) this is

15. Pete from last night. ↑here’s my number

16. if- (0.2) you: wanna text me.

17. (0.8)

18. Sophie: Wha: :↑t?

19. (0.4)

20. Emma: → Hhhhhhoh my go: :d that’s a bit stu:pid,=









21. Sophie: =But then stupidly I phoned him on

22. Saturday. [...]

While recounting a story about what might happen if you give your telephone

number to a man, Sophie describes Pete as a ‘bastard’ for texting her late at night

and waking her up. The complaint-worthiness of Pete’s actions, and Sophie’sstance towards and assessment of them, is strongly implied by the markedupward shift in pitch throughout her turn (lines 10–13). Her assessment of

Pete’s actions is separated from her description of them by an equally marked

drop in pitch ‘↑↑woke ↑me up.=↓the bastard,’. After a gap, Sophie does a second

‘incredulous’ assessment of Pete’s behaviour (‘Wha::↑t?’), which is followed by a

third produced by Emma (‘that’s a bit stu:pid,’). Emma’s assessment is somewhat

downgraded from ‘bastard’ and is an evaluation of Pete’s actions, rather than his

character . What Sophie’s story tells us, however, are the actions that constitute and

warrant the label ‘bastard’, and her ascription is somewhat ratified by Emma inthe next turn.

In our data, perhaps obviously, we do not find a response that asks the recipi-

ent of the insult to reflect on it (for example, ‘So in what sense might you be

called a bastard?’). Instead, it is the insult itself that is the action in question, the

offence, and the target for responding to. This presumably is not a general law of

discourse and insolence, in that direct confrontations may well show a different

pattern. Rather, it is a feature of the settings and interactional work being done

where we have found these insults in our data, as quotations, as part of making

accusations, complaints and counter-complaints about an (absent) abuser, andin talk being done in the service of mediation and policing. We can now linkthis pattern to the earlier observation on uses of pro-terms when editing quoted

insults (‘white this’, etc.). Pro-terms, whatever else their uses may be, are devices

that discourage unpacking of their content. The point made by pro-terms is that

some such insult has been used, not that it has any descriptive value.

Here is another fragment in which we focus on the mediator’s response to

the report of racial abuse.

Extract 28 EC-13

1. C: An’ a coupla times:since then. .pt. .hhh

2. M: Ye- racial abuse.

3. C: Yep.

4. M: → °H:mm.°

5. (1.1)

6. C: Uh: >I- I-< I’m Asian: : my Wes- my [wi:fe is] West

7. M: → [Right. ]

8. C: Indian:

9. M: → ↑Oh: o- [okay. (Mm.)]

10. C: [.hhhh um: : ]11. (0.9)

12. C: Um: uh such as (.) Paki family: etcetera hhh

13. M: → Oh: : : .

14. (0.2)









M acknowledges C’s report of ‘racial abuse’ first by formulating it (line 2) and

then acknowledging C’s confirmation (lines 3–4). Note that the words ‘Asian’ and

‘West Indian’, offered (and receipted by M on line 7) as C’s categories and ‘just’

description, are transformed into ‘Paki family’ as the neighbour’s constructed

‘racial abuse’. But what is particularly interesting is the contrasting prosody on

the two ‘Oh’ responses (lines 9 and 13). Whereas ‘hOh: o- [okay. (Mm.)]’ treatsC’s self-categorization as ‘news’, the same lexical item ‘Oh: : : .’ with different

‘sympathetic/disappointment’ prosody (it starts at the middle of M’s pitch range,

and does a gradual fall towards the bottom) does a coordinated second assessment

in response to the reported racial insult.

Consider another extract, from a call to anti-social behaviour services, which

neatly demonstrates our more general finding. The caller is a shopkeeper reporting

‘some anti-social behaviour’, which amounts to problems with youths smoking

drugs and hanging about outside her shop intimidating her customers.

Extract 29 AC-6

1. C: (...) =I mean I’ve- (.) I’ve (.) caught

2. them sort’f : kickin’ the ball up on:to the

3. roof. = we’ve just had (0.3) the roof: redo:ne.

4. a few weeks *back.*

5. A: → M-right.=

6. C: =I’ve caught them >kickin’ the ball on the

7. roof.<=.hhh they ha:ve done um: a little bit

8. of: graffiti cos there’s an Indian ta: :keaway9. next door an’ [when I] spoke to him about it

10. A: → [Ri:gh’]

11. C: an’ .hhh and he’d actually had on his: (0.4)

12. → um: : on his wall <go home Pa:kis,>

13. A: → .Tch

14. (0.5)

Whereas the ‘ball incident’ and report of graffiti get ‘M-right’ and ‘ri:gh’’ (lines 5

and 10) as acknowledgement tokens, A (the antisocial behaviour officer)

responds to the direct reported ‘text’ ‘<go home Pa:kis,>’ quite differently withan emphasized tut: ‘.Tch’ (line 13). Although, like the mediator in our other

examples, A does not elaborate further, but returns the conversational floor to

the caller, her ‘tutting’ response is morally evaluative (see Stokoe and Edwards, in

press, on ‘mundane morality’, and Potter and Hepburn, in press a, on the speci-

fic work of ‘tuts’). Thus it appears that there is something about the reporting of

racism, more than reports of other complainable behaviour, that occasions a shift

away from the neutral position routinely maintained by institutional recipients,

and/or it is the caller’s use of RS that successfully gets their recipient to align

somewhat with their version of events.Before we move onto police responses, consider a final mediation call. The

caller has been describing an ongoing neighbour dispute, and the listed com-

plainables include C’s neighbour breaking her door with his fist, complaining








about her children, and insulting her children and husband. M has been ex-

plaining what mediation is, but C has displayed reluctance to proceed.

Extract 30 EC-21

1. C: (...) she’s already been down to the council >offices<2. .hh made false allegations about- sayin’ I’ve- (0.3)

3. give her a lot of raci:sm, (0.6) [an’ I have ne:ver=

4. M: [°Mm:m.°

5. C: =call- I did admit t- months and months ago I

6. have a big barney with her an’ I did call ’er

7. → a loud-mouthed fuckin’ *le(h)s:bian.

8. (0.3)

9. C: .hhh but that is all I have ever called ’er.

10. (0.6)

11. C: Once.

12. (0.4)

13. C: Out of temper.

14. (0.3)

15. C: But she’s been down there: (0.2) an’ said

16. I’ve called ’er this that an’ the other I

17. don’t know what she’s said,

18. (0.5)

19. C: But I know she’s been down there: an’ made

20. (.) race allegations against me,

21. (0.7)

22. C: Right- because I: went down’ere the next day

23. an’ I’ve done exactly the same.=because she

24. ha:s made racial abuse to me.=she’s called me

25. → a wh:ite this a whi:te that, .hhhh

26. → (0.2)

27. C: → An’ stuff:.

28. → (.)

29. C: Right.=an’ no:w I think it’s gone too fa:r.

30. → (.)

31. C: Because they said about the mediation an’

32. that a- an’ I’m [not int ]erested no more.

33. M: [ Mmm ]

C is accusing her neighbour of racial abuse, countering the neighbour’s own

prior allegation. Counter-complaints are very common across our data, and

function to position those being complained about as the victims rather than per-

petrators of troubles. They undermine the complaints made against the speaker,

by proposing a narrative sequence in which the other party’s actions preceded,

and therefore caused (and thereby mitigate) anything the caller may admit to,

or be proven to have said and done.C’s formulation of the insult, prefaced by the general category ‘racial abuse’,

conforms to the pattern identified previously: having a two-word design ‘wh:itethis’, ‘whi:te that’, where the pro-terms ‘this’ and ‘that’ represent the deleted








second word (lines 24–5). But, in contrast to previous extracts, there is no align-

ing response from M following her report (lines 26, 28, 30). In fact, after C’s

prior admission that she has called her neighbour a ‘loud-mouthed fucking

le(h)sbian’, M produces no responses at all (lines 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 21), and

takes a turn only after C returns to procedural matters (line 33). Why should

that be? It may be that, since C has herself admitted to insulting her neighbour,M is hearing this dispute as reciprocal, or as C’s fault. He may also treat a white

person complaining about racial abuse as somewhat implausible. But in any

case, he withholds affiliation with her complaints.

C’s admission (at lines 6–7) might therefore be a damaging move in telling her

side to the mediator. One thing it does is enhance the credibility of her subsequent

denial: admitting to saying something offensive counters any notion that she

might be disposed to portray herself as talking only sweetness and light. Her

admission is also minimized: it is framed as something that happened ‘months

and months’ ago, as a one-off incident (line 9), within at least a mutually abusiverelationship (lines 1–2, 15–20, 23–7), and said out of emotion rather than char-

acter or attitude (line 13). Crucially, it contrasts with the general, scripted ‘lot of

racism’ the caller regularly receives from her neighbour. Note also the laughter

particle that punctuates precisely the word ‘le(h)s:bian’, which displays her

‘attitude’ to having said it. The caller displays that bit of abuse as jokey, a one-

off, and not seriously her general view. Finally, however, note again the hierarchy

of categories that emerges in this extract: the caller is clearly happier (at least in

this context) to admit to saying something homophobic, ‘dirty fucking lesbian’,

than something racist.Having examined the responses by mediators to reports of racial abuse, we

conclude the analysis with some examples of what happens when suspects make

counter-complaints of racial abuse within police interrogations. We observed

earlier that RS containing racial person formulations in police interviews is often

unrelated to the basis on which the suspect has been arrested, but comes as a

counter allegation (or mitigation) about the suspect’s alleged victim.

Extract 31 PN-59

1. (1.8)2. P: .pt ↑Right >I don’t think there’s anythin’ else

3. I want to ask you< uh (.) Joh [n.

4. S: [*O:kay.

5. (.)

6. S: °Thank [you very ↑ much.°

7. P: [Is there anythin’ else you wanna add. .hh

8. (0.2)

10. P: Any- (0.2) .h [( )]

11. S: [Ye:h I ] would like you to investigate

12. him.13. (0.2)

14. S: fo:*:r (.) racist remarks. against my family:h.

15. → (.)

16. S: Callin’ them <Paki bastards.>









17. → (0.6)

18. P: → .pthhh Okay that’s: (.) certainly something we can

19. look into.

In contrast to both ordinary talk and mediation calls, S’s report of ‘racist re-

marks’ is followed by a 0.6-second gap (line 17) before P acknowledges andrecords S’s accusation for a follow-up investigation (lines 18–19). AlthoughP does not produce an evaluative assessment of S’s allegation, neither does shereceipt it with a continuer to return the floor to S. So whereas mediators producesympathetic but ‘continuing’ responses to reports of racial abuse, here P startsa new action. Here is another example.

Extract 32 PN-628

1. S: ~An’ ↑ever since we’ve moved in we’ve ↑↑h(h)ad

2. ↑several ↑peo(h)ple .hhih ↑come up to ↑us an’3. say~ “we ↑↑WANT you ~out~ ~you smell you (.)

4. ↑Pakis:~ you- ( )” .hhih hhuh

5. → (0.4)

6. S: .skuh and ~this ↑all hhuh (0.2) got worse .hhih7. when William confronted m(h)e .HHih on one

8. ↑↑occ(h) asi (h)on when I was pi (h) ckin’.shih

9. (0.3) my kids up from school- my mother-in-law10. was with me: it started off in February .hhih~

11. (0.2)

12. S: ~An’ then it jus’~ went on: an’ on: an on:13. ↑.hhih

14. → (0.2)

15. P: → [( )]

16. S: [( )] .hhih17. (0.3)

18. P: → Has Carol ever- (0.2) [said ] anything like

19. S: [.shih ]20. P: that to you.=

Again, there is no affiliation or acknowledgement following S’s report of racialabuse at potential places where such things might occur (lines 5, 11). We cannot

hear what P says at line 15 because S and P start their turns at the same time

and continue in overlap. In any case, at line 18, P continues on topic, in pursuitof further testimony of racial abuse. Here is a final example.

Extract 33 PN-100

1. S: When I got outside there was two of ’em.

2. (0.6)

3. S: on- (.) outside my house but on the opposite side

4. of the road.

5. (0.2)

6. P: → Yeh

7. (1.4)









8. S: So I wen’ over t’them, (1.8) told ’em t’fuck off 9. basically an’ (0.3) th-they stood there squarin’

10. up t’me.

11. (1.3)12. S: .pt.hh I pushed one of ’em, (0.8) he fell over,

13. (0.3)14. P: → Mhm,

15. (0.5)16. S: .hhh then a thir:d one (0.4) came running u- runni-

17. runnin’ towards me sayin’ I’m gonna fucking kill yuh

18. yuh fuckin’ nigger.19. → (0.5)

20. S: So I retreated ba- (0.5) ’e kept comin’ back t’my:

21. (0.2) onto my property (0.3) an’ he’s manhandlin’ me.22. (0.4)

23. S: An’ that’s when I ’it him.

24. (0.2)

25. S: With my (0.3) with my bar.26. (0.4)

27. P: → [Mm]

28. S: [ In ] self defence.29. (0.4)

30. S: T’get ’im off me.

31. (1.6)

32. P: → .pt So he said he- he’s runnin’ at you [...]

S’s report of racial abuse, embedded in his narrative account of events, receives

no response from the police officer. Interestingly, P produces several acknow-

ledgement tokens throughout this narrative (lines 6, 14, 27), but there is noth-

ing at line 19 following the RS ‘I’m gonna fucking kill yuh yuh fuckin’ nigger’.

At line 32, P starts to formulate S’s account as testimony for the record.While mediators (and our one antisocial behaviour officer) respond to clients’

reports of racial abuse with a minimal acknowledgement token, they nevertheless

imbue these responses with prosodic features that display some affiliation with

the client. Responses to reports of racial abuse, in contrast to reports of other

complainables, therefore get ‘more’ evaluative alignment. Police officers do not makeany such response to suspects’ reports of racial abuse, although they do produce

continuers and acknowledgement tokens at other places in suspects’ narrations.

We discuss this and other findings in the final concluding section of the article.

Concluding remarks

The idea for this article stemmed from an interest in how matters of ‘race’ might

be important in neighbour complaints and related criminal investigations.

Preliminary analysis of our large data corpus, which we trawled for instancesof relevant issues and concepts, lead us to the topic of racial insults, done inthe specific context of ‘reported speech’. We were then able to hold a micro-

scope to moments of people’s lives in which ethnicity and racism were being








systematically produced and managed. We examined the precise sequential

location, composition, design and response to reports of racial insults. One

might intuit that if racist abuse was one possible complainable, and given its

understood severity and legal relevance, it would be foregrounded in complaints

that include other matters such as noisy children or broken fences. However,

we found that both in calls to mediation centres and in police interrogations,these reports occurred, perhaps surprisingly, not as the first order of business, butas one of a list of complainable items, or else as a counter-complaint made againstthe other party to the dispute. This is not to say that racist abuse is less com-plainable than other offences. Indeed, we have seen that although speakers donot foreground racist incidents in their longer lists of problems, they do appearto treat racist abuse as a special case – something to be denied when other formsof abuse are admitted, and something which is used to discredit the other partyin the dispute.

A striking finding with regard to racial insults themselves is their constructionusing an oriented-to practice of combining two words: often a swear-word plus anational identity, race or ethnicity category. Although some terms clearly possessa built-in prejudicial sense on their own (‘Paki’, ‘nigger’), we also found a patternin which speakers edit one of the paired words, maintaining a two-word formulation,editing the swear-word and leaving the racial category. Speakers further orient tothe ‘two-wordedness’ of racial insults in their carefully managed use one-wordformulations. Finally, while mediators respond to clients’ reports of racial abusewith an acknowledgement token that passes the floor back to them; they imbuetheir responses with prosodic features that display a degree of affiliation with

the client’s report. Responses to reports of racial abuse, in contrast to reports of other complainables, display stronger evaluative alignment. In contrast, policeofficers make no affiliative response to suspects’ reports of racial abuse, althoughthey do produce continuers and acknowledgement tokens at other places in sus-pects’ narrations. What we find is a continuum or responses to insults/complaintsdone in RS in ordinary and institutional talk, from explicit second assessmentsdone in ordinary talk, to minimal but affiliative responses in mediation calls, toan absence of response in police interviews. Mediators’ responses preserve theirneutrality while displaying alignment to their clients (and possibly attending to

their own identity as someone who assesses racism negatively). Police officers’lack of response demonstrates their treatment of suspects’ accounts, regardlessof content, as factual testimony for the record, and they tend to pursue thosefeatures of testimony as crime relevant.

Our comparison of different institutional sites therefore helps us understand‘their distinct features as the embodiment of social institutional tasks’ (Drew andHeritage, 2006). For example, we can see ‘participants’ orientations to their re-spective identities’ (Drew and Heritage, 2006) – as clients, mediators, suspects,or police officers – in the systematically different responses to complaints aboutreported insults, which contrast with what friends do in ordinary talk. Fur-thermore, whereas callers to mediation services often include a generalizingcomponent to their report of abuse (‘an’ all this ↑no:n↓sense.’), police officers’questions to suspects about whether they uttered a racial insult do not includesuch features. Their questions, as we have seen, incorporate direct quotes from








(or are produced as directly quoting from) witness testimony, which itself is

produced for criminal investigations. Whether these written reports actually

contain phrases like ‘blah blah’ or ‘etcetera’, they do not appear as things to

deny or admit in police interviews, in which the precise words used are the focus

of questioning.

We conclude by underscoring the value of analysing naturally occurring data,in contrast to research interviews, as an empirical basis for investigating not just

racism and neighbour disputes but other social problems (cf. Maynard, 1988).

Notwithstanding the initial difficulty of capturing people talking about racism or

in racist ways, we have shown the possibility of exploring the way racism features

as an accountable matter in sequential courses of action. As Zimmerman (2005)

puts it, whereas it might appear that conversation analytic studies deal with the

‘mundane’ and ‘trivial’ or ‘commonsensical’ matters of social life; things which

seem far removed from the ‘big’ issues, such as power, inequality, racism, and thelike . . . such issues can have very ordinary affairs as a foundation, sustained by

routine and largely unnoticed practices that are a part of interactional organization.Perhaps big issues have a humble home hidden in plain sight, in the ordinary workings of

social life. (Zimmerman, 2005: 445, emphasis added)

Neighbour disputes, their mediation, and police interrogations concerning

neighbourhood crimes, are just such ‘humble homes’ for the management of

social identities and conflict in the live scenes of everyday life.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

We are grateful to Michael Billig, Margaret Wetherell and an anonymous reviewer, for

their useful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

N O T E S

1. Most of this corpus has been collected as part of ESRC grant number RES-148-25-0010

‘Identities in Neighbour Discourse: Community, Conflict and Exclusion’ held by

E. Stokoe and D. Edwards.2. Asterisks denote a ‘croaky’ voice quality.3. Side arrows indicate target lines for analysis of the transcript.

4. The sections of transcript bounded by underscores have a ‘flat’ or expressionless

delivery, unlike what is commonly found in everyday quotation, which is acted outin imitative or exaggerated fashion. But in any case, the method of quoting involves

marking the quotation off by use of a shift of intonation and voice quality. The

particular shift to flat rather than animated delivery may do the work, for policeofficers, of maintaining neutrality as quoters – they are quoting a third party witness,

not themselves making a complaint. See also Potter and Hepburn (in press a).

5. Indeed, the word has become a conventional term of abuse on its own (for example,

‘D’you u:se the word Pakis.’). As Guimarães (2003: 136) points out, writing aboutthe category ‘negro’, ‘since the social and racial position of the insulted is already

historically established by means of a long process of prior humiliation and

subordination, the very term that designates them as a racial group (‘preto’ or ‘negro’)








Dersley, I. and Wootton, A. (2000) ‘Complaint Sequences Within Antagonistic Argument’,

Research on Language and Social Interaction 33(4): 375–406.

Drew, P. (1998) ‘Complaints About Transgressions and Misconduct’, Research on Language

and Social Interaction 31(3&4): 295–325.

Drew, P. and Heritage, J. (2006) ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in P. Drew and J. Heritage (eds)

Conversation Analysis (Four volume set). London: SAGE.Edwards, D. (1994) ‘Script Formulations: A Study of Event Descriptions in Conversation’,

Journal of Language and Social Psychology 13(3): 211–47.

Edwards, D. (1995) ‘Two to Tango: Script Formulations, Dispositions, and Rhetorical

Symmetry in Relationship Troubles Talk’, Research on Language and Social Interaction

28(4): 319–50.

Edwards, D. (2000) ‘Extreme Case Formulations: Softeners, Investment, and Doing

Nonliteral’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 33(4): 347–73.

Edwards, D. (2005) ‘Moaning, Whinging and Laughing: The Subjective Side of Com-

plaints’, Discourse Studies 7(1): 5–29.

Evaldsson, A.C. (2005) ‘Staging Insults and Mobilizing Categorizations in a MultiethnicPeer Group’, Discourse & Society 16: 763–86.

Goodwin, M.H. (1990) He-Said-She-Said : Talk as Social Organization Among Black Children.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Guimarães, A.S.A. (2003) ‘Racial Insult in Brazil’, Discourse & Society 14: 133–51.

Haakana, M. (2006) ‘Reported Thought in Complaint Stories’. in E. Holt and R. Clift (eds)

Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hansen, A.D. (2005) ‘A Practical Task: Ethnicity as a Resource in Social Interaction’,


Hepburn, A. (2004) ‘Crying: Notes on Description, Transcription and Interaction’,

Research on Language and Social Interaction 37(3): 251–90.Heritage, J.C. and Atkinson, J.M. (1984) ‘Introduction’, in J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage

(eds) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Holt, E. (1996) ‘Reporting on Talk: The Use of Direct Reported Speech in Conversation’,


Holt, E. (2000) ‘Reporting and Reacting: Concurrent Responses to Reported Speech’,


Holt, E. and Clift, R. (eds) (2006) Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Jefferson, G. (1990) ‘List Construction as a Task and Resource’, in G. Psathas (ed.)Inter-

action Competence. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Jefferson, G. (2004a) ‘“At First I Thought”: A Normalizing Device for Extraordinary

Events’, in G.H. Lerner (ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation.

Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Jefferson, G. (2004b) ‘Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction’, in G. Lerner

(ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Klewitz, G. and Couper-Kuhlen, E. (1999) ‘Quote–Unquote: The Role of Prosody in the

Contextualization of Reported Speech Sequences’, Pragmatics 9(4): 459–85.

Kochman, T. (1983) ‘The Boundary Between Play and Nonplay in Black Verbal Dueling’,

Language in Society 12: 329–37.

Labov, W. (1972a) Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular .

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Labov, W. (1972b) ‘Rules for Ritual Insults’, in D. Sudnow (ed.) Studies in Social Interaction.

New York: Free Press.









Laforest, M. (2002) ‘Scenes of Family Life: Complaining in Everyday Conversation’, Journal

of Pragmatics 34(10–11): 1595–620.

Leach, E. (1979) ‘Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal

Abuse’, in W. Lessa and E.Z. Vogt (eds) Reader in Comparative Religion. New York: Harperand Row.

Linell, P. and Jönsson, L. (1991) ‘Suspect Stories: On Perspective Setting in an AsymmetricalSituation’, in I. Marková and K. Foppa (eds) Asymmetries in Dialogue. Hemel Hempstead:

Harvester Wheatsheaf.Maynard, D.W. (1988) ‘Language, Interaction, and Social Problems’, Social Problems

35(4): 311–34.

McKenzie, K. (2003) ‘Discursive Psychology and the “New Racism”’, Human Studies 26:461–91.

Overstreet, M. (1999) Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English

Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Pomerantz, A. (1986) ‘Extreme Case Formulations: A Way of Legitimizing Claims’,Human

Studies 9: 219–29.

Pomerantz, A. and Mandelbaum, J. (2005) ‘Conversation Analytic Approaches to the

Relevance and Uses of Relationship Categories in Interaction’, in K.L. Fitch andR.E. Sanders (eds) Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Potter, J. (1996) Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric, and Social Construction. London:

SAGE.Potter, J. and Hepburn, A. (in press a) ‘Crying Receipts: Time, Empathy and Instutional

Practice’, Research on Language and Social Interaction.

Potter, J. and Hepburn, A. (in press b) ‘Somewhere Between Evil and Normal: Traces of Morality in a Child Protection Helpline’, in J. Cromdal and M. Tholander (eds) Children,

Morality and Interaction. London: Equinox.

Rapley, M. (1998) ‘“Just an Ordinary Australian”: Self-Categorisation and the DiscursiveConstruction of Facticity in “New Racist” Political Rhetoric’, British Journal of Social

Psychology 37: 325–44.

Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation (Vol. I and II, edited by G. Jefferson). Oxford:

Blackwell.Sales, R. (2005) ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven: A Contradiction in Terms?’, Ethnic and Racial

Studies 28(3): 445–62.

Schegloff, E.A. (2005) ‘On Complainability’, Social Problems 52(4): 449–76.Schegloff, E.A. (2007) Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation

Analysis. Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Silverman, D. (2001) Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction. London: SAGE.

Stokoe, E.H. (2003) ‘Mothers, Single Women and Sluts: Gender, Morality and Membership

Categorization in Neighbour Disputes’, Feminism and Psychology 13(3): 317–44.

Stokoe, E. (2006a) ‘On Ethnomethodology, Feminism, and the Analysis of CategorialReference to Gender in Talk-in-Interaction’, Sociological Review 54(3): 467–94.

Stokoe, E. (2006b) ‘Public Intimacy in Neighbour Relationships and Complaints’,Sociological Research Online 11(3). Available: www.socresonline.org.uk/11/3/stokoe.

html (accessed 01 2007).Stokoe, E. (in press) ‘Categories and Sequences: Formulating Gender in Talk-in Interaction’,

in L. Litosseliti, H. Saunston, K. Segall and J. Sunderland (eds) Language and Gender Research Methodologies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Stokoe, E. and Edwards, D. (in press) ‘Mundane Morality and Gender in Familial Neighbour

Disputes’, in J. Cromdal and M. Tholander (eds) Children, Morality and Interaction.

London: Equinox.









Stokoe, E. and Edwards, D. (forthcoming a) ‘Doing Denials and Accusations with Identity

Categories’, Text and Talk.

Stokoe, E. and Edwards, D. (forthcoming b) ‘Racism in Reported Neighbour Complaints:

Calls to a Neighbourhood Mediation Centre’.

Stokoe, E.H. and Hepburn, A. (2005) ‘“You Can Hear a Lot Through the Walls”: Noise

Formulations in Neighbour Complaints’, Discourse & Society 16: 647–73.Tannen, D. (1989) Talking Voices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tannock, S. (1999) ‘Working With Insults: Discourse and Difference in an Inner-city

Youth Organization’, Discourse & Society 10: 317–22.

Van den Berg, H., Wetherell, M. and Houtkoop-Steenstra, H. (eds) (2003) Analysing Race

Talk: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Interview. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Van Dijk, T. (1987) Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk. London:

SAGE.

Van Dijk, T. (1991) Racism and the Press. London: Routledge.

Van Dijk, T. (1992) ‘Discour se and the Denial of Racism’, Discourse & Society 3:87–118.

Wetherell, M. and Potter, J. (1992) Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the

Legitimation of Exploitation. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Whalen, M.R. and Zimmerman, D.H. (1990) ‘Describing Trouble: Practical Epistemology

in Citizen Calls to the Police’, Language in Society 19: 465–92.

Wooffitt, R. (1992) Telling Tales of the Unexpected: The Organization of Factual Discourse.

London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Zimmerman, D.H. (2005) ‘Introduction: Conversation Analysis and Social Problems’,

Social Problems 52(4): 445–8.

E L I Z A B E T H S T O K O E is a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at

Loughborough University. She is currently working with Derek Edwards on an ESRC-

funded study of neighbour disputes and complaints. She has written extensively on the

topic of gender and interaction, including editing a special issue of Discourse & Society

(2002, with Ann Weatherall), and is currently writing two books on the topic (Analysing

Gender and Interaction, SAGE; Conversation and Gender, Cambridge University Press, with

Susan Speer). She is also the author of Discourse and Identity (2006, Edinburgh UniversityPress, with Bethan Benwell). A D D R E S S : Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough

University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK. [email: [email protected]]

DEREK EDWARDS is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Social Sciences,

Loughborough University. His interests are in the analysis of language and social

interaction in everyday and institutional settings. He specializes in discursive psychology,

in which relations between psychological states and the external world are studied as

discourse categories and practices. Current work focuses on action formulations, per-

son descriptions and intentionality in neighbour disputes, mediation, and police inter-

rogations. His books include Common Knowledge, with Neil Mercer (Routledge, 1987),

Ideological Dilemmas, with Michael Billig and others (SAGE, 1988), Discursive Psychology,with Jonathan Potter (SAGE, 1992), and Discourse and Cognition (SAGE, 1997).

A D D R E S S : Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11

3TU, UK. [email: [email protected]]

2007.police interrogation

Documents