Popular Culture Review Vol. 15, No. 1 | Page 147

The Language of COPS 143 they should get control of events and that one way in which that could be done was to use the type of language suitable for that crime situation. In addition, Stillar’s concept of theme seems relevant in this analysis. By theme, I mean that there is an order of linguistic elements in language, in this case, the English language (46). In English, the theme of a sentence is marked by units that occur in the initial position. In commands, we assign actions that we want our listeners to carry out. From the data, officers used commands more often than questions or statements. In commanding an individual to “Put the gun down,” the theme was on the weapon, as opposed to the command “Put the gun down on the floor,” where the prepositional phrase “on the floor” would be a secondary feature of the command. In addition, this analysis of language and social situations further supports the notion of communicative competence (O’Grady et. al 454). In other words, unlike grammatical competence, which allows us to determine grammatical from ungrammatical utterances, communicative competence allows speakers to use language that is appropriate to the situation or c