The Multimodal Expression of Denial

A Case Study on Femicide Suspects

Abstract

This pilot study investigates multimodal denial by analysing the discourses of male suspects of femicide that are the victims’ (ex-)intimate partners and friends. We deploy an exploratory approach to map recurrent verbal and nonverbal features of denial in an ad hoc corpus of North-American English (over 10 hours and 101,000 tokens) of audio-video material, featuring guilty suspects of femicide in two legal contexts (i.e., police interviews and courtroom hearings). Our findings suggest that denial is constructed linguistically by means of several strategies that complement and reinforce each other. Besides an extensive use of the morpho-syntactic realization of negation, suspects deny the accusations through recurrent multimodal features, such as, headshakes, shoulder shrugs, gaze direction (towards law enforcement officers), and open hands (either still or moving onward). We also observe that in our corpus denial co-occurs with repetitions, anaphora, vagueness, and reduced sentence length. These results call for additional systematic research on multimodality in legal interactions and in other contexts.