Pragmatics of actors’ inclusion and exclusion in suspects’ confessional statements in Nigerian online news reports

Abstract

Studies on suspects’ confessional statements during interrogations abound. However, sufficient attention has not been paid to suspects’ confessional statements as captured in newspaper reports, especially how suspects deploy discursive resources to frame inclusion and exclusion in crime. Thus, this study attempts to examine how suspects recruit context-sensitive linguistic devices in their confessional statements reported in Nigerian dailies and blogs. Seven inclusion/exclusion strategies are identified in this work. The study states that these linguistic strategies serve various functions, primarily to amplify or downplay the severity of the crime committed, and to de-emphasise the suspects' involvement in an attempt to pursue exoneration. Depending on the situation they find themselves in, suspects leverage these linguistic devices to construct narratives of guilt, ignorance, innocence, withdrawal, shared responsibility, self-defense, and remorse. It will be interesting to see how future studies would incorporate a corpus-aided approach into this study.