When Silence Means Acceptance

Heydon Georgina , The Language of Police Interviewing: A critical analysis (2005).

Drew Paul Heritage John (eds), Talk at Work (1992); this edited collection is a seminal text in applying CA to institutional settings.

The rules of turn-taking were first identified in Sacks Harvey Schegloff Emanuel Jefferson Gail , ‘A Simplest Systematics for the Organisation of Turn-taking for Conversation’ (1974) 50(4) Language 696.

The Standing Orders were superseded in the early 1990s by the Operating Procedures of the Victoria Police Manual, which present the same information in a more succinct format. However, the Standing Orders provide a more interpretative insight to the Crimes Act and in any case, were still current when the data analysed here were recorded. For further discussion of this issue, see Heydon, above n 1, 6.

Victoria Police Standing Orders Section 8.8.

Bilmes Jack , ‘The Concept of Preference in Conversation Analysis’ (1988) 17 Language in Society 161.

Ibid 162.

Atkinson J. Maxwell Drew Paul , Order in Court: The organisation of verbal interaction in judicial settings (1979).

Bilmes , above n 6, 167.

Ibid.

Ibid, 167–9.

Frankel Richard , ‘Talking in interviews: A dispreference for patient-initiated questions in physician-patient encounters’ in Psathas George (ed), Interaction Competence (1990) 231.

Detailed, or ‘narrow’, transcriptions, using symbols to illustrate as many linguistic features as possible, are an essential part of the CA approach to micro-level language analysis, as the variation in pitch, emphasis and timing can be critical to the interpretation of a speaker's turn. Symbols show features such as overlapping speech, “latching – when the next utterance starts immediately after the previous turn, and pauses measured in seconds and fractions of second. Transcription conventions have, however, been removed from these extracts but are available from the author.

Bilmes , above n 6, 167.

Ibid.

See for instance Hamer David , ‘Does Silence Imply Guilt?’ (2006) 72 (Jan–Feb) Precedent 4; Biber Katherine , ‘On Not Speaking: The right to silence, the gagged trial judge and the spectre of child sexual abuse’ (2005) 30(1) Alternative Law Journal 19.