Reporting Verbs as Evaluative Devices in Police Report Narratives in English

Abstract

This paper examines reporting verbs as a means of evaluating situations, actions and propositions present in personal experience narratives. The corpus for this study was composed of official police reports in English. The choice of the reporting verb tells us something about the writer’s thoughts, feelings and interpretations in connection with a particular situation, and, when actions or propositions of other people are concerned, the writer gives his or her personal assessment of the credibility of such propositions or their author as a witness or suspect. In this way, police reports, the same as other personal narratives, not only present reality but also construct it given the subjective nature of evaluation itself.