L. Mutonga

The Language of Police Officers in Zimbabwe: the Case of Mbare Police Station L. Mutonga

This book looks at the different ways through which Police officers manipulate various linguistic devices to address clients at Mbare Police Station. From the conversational interaction between Police officers and members of the public who visits Mbare Police station, the researcher managed to put members of the public who included accused persons, people visiting their relatives in police custody, those who visited the police station to get different services like having their documents certified and those who want to report crime cases. in this study, a member of linguistic devices, for example friendship terms, and kinship terms were identified as some of the frequently used linguistic features as address terms. it was found out that linguistic features used as address terms by the police to refer to different categories of people were used interchangeably depending on the intentions of the police officer. this implies that address terms are not mutually exclusive to a certain category of people, for example, friendship terms are used to refer to both accused persons and those visiting their relatives in police custody for different reasons.