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Popular Culture Review
In short, speakers take these issues into account before and during moments of
verbal interaction. These factors of communication, I believe, are carried out in a
very rapid manner since speakers could not be seen as stopping to make these
judgments as they communicate (Taylor and Taylor 102)2.
What might be of interest, in addition to the issues of communication
cited above, is to look further to see what goes into the construction of utterances.
According to Taylor and Taylor, speakers go through four stages in
communication: conceptualize, select, formulate, and articulate (99). The same
procedure might also apply to some degree in written communication. These
features of communication are part of the interplay of language and thought, a
discipline known as psycholinguistics. In brief, an individual thinks of what he or
she wants to say. Next, the individual selects words according to their
phonological shapes, puts these words into a sentence with the appropriate
grammatical classes (e.g. noun, adjective, verb), and finally articulates that
message. Thus, rather than see communication as separate subdisciplines sociolinguistics or psycholinguistics- the better approach would be to see them as
co-occurring elements of communication. In other words, speakers bring together
aspects of social factors (e.g., age, gender, speech situation) with their thought
processes simultaneously.
Language study is a very broad academic enterprise, and it is imperative
that investigators narrow the scope of study. Unmindful of the areas of interest
being pursued, however, one strategy that researchers generally follow is to look
at the structural components of language. These structural components are
phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. For
example, let us take the case of phonology. One method of analysis takes into
account the larger sociocultural factors (e.g., age, education, ethnicity, gender,
region) that shape the pronunciation of a word or words. For instance, some
speakers of American English drop the final consonant of words such as cold or
bold to produce col [kol] and bol [bol] while others tend to keep it. For the
analyst of language, however, he or she desires to learn about the conditions that
influence the pronunciation of such words.
The Language of COPS
In studying language heard and used in the program COPS, I may use a
similar method of inquiry as that established when studying the structural
components of language. Given the scope of inquiry, it might not be profitable to
specify all of the structural elements of language.3 However, I would like to
know some of the possible variables or conditions that shape the type of language
used in certain speech situations involving officers and suspects. The aim of this
study is to identify specific types of linguistic structures, specifically syntactic
ones, and the social situations under which police officers use them when
confronting suspects or when responding to events of lawbreaking.