In prior research, warnings and threats have been regarded as closely related speech acts, distinguished only by an unobservable state. In this article, I conceptualize warnings and threats as fraternal speech acts because they share the essential genetic trait of their rhetorical parent: force. In this article, I examine the ‘warnings’ that police officers give to motorists during traffic stops, and the threats that police make to citizens and suspects during routine patrol work. I argue that, by virtue of their institutional identity and ideological mandate, there is no interpretive context free of coercion in the context of police–citizen encounters. I locate the difference between warnings and threats – direct and indirect – in the ordinal level of force embedded in the intention of speakers and in the unfavorable consequences suffered by the addressee.
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