The aim of this article is to examine how police investigators reproduce interviewees’ utterances in narratives, in direct and indirect reported speech, and by enclosing words in reports in quotation marks. Drawing on a larger study of professional writing, the pertinent research question for the current investigation is how writing techniques in police interview reports convey evidential value in the form of reported utterances. A corpus of police reports on domestic violence is explored from the theoretical perspectives of critical discourse analysis, polyvocality and reportative evidentiality. A new analytical framework for polyvocal texts is developed in terms of utterance, source and framer. The results show that it is difficult to determine whether or not words placed within quotation marks are meant to present verbatim quotes. Another finding is that police investigators are not consistent in documenting utterances from different sources, or in showing whether utterances are embedded in other utterances. This may obscure the structure of the original events and the source of crucial utterances, resulting in unclear evidential status for police reports.

中文翻译：

---

证据：警察采访报告中事件的语言转换

本文的目的是研究警方调查人员如何在叙述、直接和间接报告的言语中再现受访者的话语，以及在报告中用引号引起来。借鉴对专业写作的更大研究，当前调查的相关研究问题是警察采访报告中的写作技巧如何以报告话语的形式传达证据价值。从批判性话语分析、多头性和报告性证据性的理论角度探讨了关于家庭暴力的警方报告语料库。在话语、来源和框架方面开发了一个新的多声文本分析框架。结果表明，很难确定放在引号内的单词是否意味着逐字引用。另一个发现是，警方调查人员在记录来自不同来源的话语，或者在显示话语是否嵌入其他话语中时并不一致。这可能会模糊原始事件的结构和关键话语的来源，导致警方报告的证据状态不明确。