EVALUACIJA U POLICIJSKIM IZVJEŠTAJIMA NA ENGLESKOM JEZIKU
EVALUATION IN POLICE WRITTEN REPORTS IN ENGLISH

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the use of evaluative devices in police written reports. A police officer, as a representative of an institution, bears in mind the main goal of a report, i.e. presenting and explaining facts to the legal audience and convincing them of the propriety of the decisions s/he made in execution of his duties. As far as his actions and decisions are concerned, s/he expects as low input of contradictory opinions as possible. Police reports ought to be strictly informative. This fact defines their language in terms of impersonality and objective reference to sources of information. In this respect, direct assessments of facts and authorial voice are highly suppressed in the texts, although the reports inevitably reflect personal involvement. Objectivity and distancing are expected and presumed by both the author and the audience. However, this stereotype often confronts with indirect or covert means by which the author positions himself/herself with regard to the information given in the reports. The phenomenon of speaker opinion is understood in linguistics as evaluation, appraisal or stance. When police official reports are concerned, readers expect maximum objectivity and distancing on the part of the author, regardless of the degree of his personal involvement in the event itself. I shall try to shed some light on the lexical and grammatical choices for evaluating different aspects of events and witness’ statements made by police officers as active participants in the events themselves. The corpus-based approach is adopted in this paper to examine the effect of the specific register on the choice of evaluative forms and types. Police written reports were chosen first because of my keen interest in police written mode of communication. The corpus consists of 75 police reports in English written by the British police officers between 2001 and 2008. All the reports are fully anonymized in order to maintain confidentiality, so that the names of the participants, places and other confidential data are hidden, usually by using capitalized words such as NAME, ACCUSED, TOWN etc. The texts are in all other respects genuine and unedited.

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