When a person in crisis threatens suicide, police negotiators engage them in a conversation to prevent death. Working in small teams, the primary negotiator’s role is to talk directly to the person in crisis. A secondary negotiator, working ‘behind the scenes’, supports the ongoing negotiation. Using 31 hours of audio-recorded British negotiations, we uncover the backstage work of secondary negotiators. We use conversation analysis to identify the sequential position, linguistic form and action of the secondary negotiator’s interventions on (i) the delivery (e.g., ‘sound angry’) and (ii) next actions (e.g., ‘say please’, ‘try asking them to move’) of the primary negotiator, and how the primary incorporates them into the negotiation. Our analysis shows that, while some suggestions were effective, others disrupted the flow of the negotiation as well as the alignment between primary negotiator and person in crisis. The paper augments current sociolinguistic understandings of the high-stakes language activity of crisis negotiation and highlights the importance of attending to linguistic features of interaction when training negotiators to work better as a team.

中文翻译：

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后台工作谈判员在与危机中的人沟通时所做的工作

当处于危机中的人威胁要自杀时，警察谈判人员会与他们进行对话以防止死亡。在小团队中工作，主要谈判者的角色是直接与处于危机中的人交谈。在“幕后”工作的次要谈判代表支持正在进行的谈判。通过 31 小时的录音英国谈判，我们揭示了二级谈判代表的后台工作。我们使用对话分析来确定次要谈判者在 (i) 表达（例如，“听起来很生气”）和 (ii) 下一步行动（例如，“请说”、“试着问”）的干预的顺序位置、语言形式和行动他们移动'）的主要谈判者，以及主要如何将他们纳入谈判。我们的分析表明，虽然一些建议是有效的，其他人扰乱了谈判的进程以及主要谈判者和处于危机中的人之间的协调。该论文增强了当前对危机谈判中高风险语言活动的社会语言学理解，并强调了在培训谈判者以更好地团队合作时关注互动的语言特征的重要性。