Silence: Civil right or social privilege? A discourse analytic response to a legal problem

According to an understanding of casual conversation articulated by various theories of discourse analysis including Conversation Analysis (Sacks et al., 1974), pragmatics (Levinson, 1983) and politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987), it is extremely unlikely that silence would ever be regarded as an appropriate response to a question or accusation. Yet, in the specialised institutional setting of a police interview, it is expected by the legislators in many jurisdictions that ordinary people will be able to access this interactional resource unproblematically, and presumably without any assumption of listener prejudice.