Linguistic Ignorance or Linguistic Ideology?: Sociolinguistic and Pragmatic Issues in Police Interrogation Rules

Ever since Foucault, it has become an academic cliché to speak of discursively created disciplinary regimes. Law, however, functions both metaphorically and literally as a disciplinary regime created by and mediated through discourse. More to the point, in legal practice, a consequence such as going to jail is not just a metaphoric form of discipline but rather a physical embodied experience of the disciplinary power of law. That power, expressed in legal theory, is exercised through the use of language as a tool for the creation of and extinction of rights and obligations. Given this explicit link between the disciplinary authority of law and its use of language as a vehicle for instantiating that authority, it is unsurprising that law has been a situs for language scholars considering the consequences of language deployment. For example, J.L. Austin, in taxonomizing the performative uses of language, drew upon legal language as quintessential exemplars of words that did things(Austin, 1962). “I now pronounce you man and wife, ” or “We the jury find the defendant guilty, ” are classic examples of Austinian speech acts that, assuming appropriate felicity conditions, bring specific legal consequences into being by their utterance. In so doing, their speaker