Speech Events at a Bribery Trial

One of the least recognized linguistic tools is the speech event. It’s not an “event” in the broad sense of the term, such as an anniversary or a party. Speech events are defined by the language used in them: job interviews, business meetings, visits to the doctor, police interrogations, trials, sermons.

Most people don’t think about the usefulness of such events any more than they think about riding a bicycle or climbing the stairs. The words used during these human interactions are expected to be appropriate to the context, but we often don’t stop to analyze them. As the late Berkeley linguist John Gumperz put it, speech events are recurring occasions that have tacitly understood conventions about what counts as valid. To paraphrase the famous statement about obscenity, we know it when we hear it.

Although we expect written communication to adhere to well-marked clues to its structure and organization, oral expressions appear to have fewer restrictions, as speakers can wander from theme to theme, sometimes circling back to the original one and sometimes not.

Identifying speech events can be crucial in trials that are based on the language used by participants. Conversations are not always clear. A big problem happens when speakers give the impression that their speech event is one thing while the other speaker thinks it’s something else. The result can be humorous, but such confusion can be disastrous when a conversation is secretly tape-recorded by an undercover police officer in an effort to capture evidence of a criminal activity. Here’s how.

During their interviews, police officers are permitted to deceive their suspects about a few things, such as telling them that another suspect has previously spilled the beans on them, or that they already have other evidence that they don’t actually have. Considerably more deception is permitted during undercover conversations about drug deals, bribery, or solicitation to murder. Here the law officer can deceive suspects about their identity, their intentions, and any other facts they can get away with. This tactic often works well and actual criminals are captured when they buy the cocaine, accept a bribe, or hire a hit man.

The police can face a serious problem, however, when they are deceptive in the way they announce the speech events they claim to be in. Suppose, for example, the undercover officer is trying to see whether a state senator will take a bribe. First he claims that he represents a well-known insurance company and that he can help this senator save his state a lot of money by switching its insurance coverage. The senator is interested in this topic, adding “any time you can save the state a buck, well by God I’m for it.” So far this conversation gives every appearance of a legitimate business-transaction speech event until the undercover cop then begins to talk about giving the senator a campaign contribution, adding, “I don’t care what you do with it, how you handle it,” as he counts out $5,000 in cash.

Now the business-transaction speech event has switched to a campaign-contribution speech event. The senator accepts the money and explains that he will report this by following the state’s law, thereby avoiding committing the crime that the agent was trying to elicit.

Since things were not going the way the undercover officer expected, he then switched the speech event for the second time saying, “There is a million commission on this case. I’m keeping five hundred, and five hundred for whatever you want to do with to get the business.” Now no longer was this a business-transaction speech event or a campaign-contribution speech event. It had morphed into a bribery speech event. But the senator, confused about what was happening, now began to perceive this as a new speech event and ended their conversation saying, “We don’t want to do anything that’s illegal to get anybody in trouble, and you don’t either.”

Even though the senator rejected the offer in that part of their conversation that contained a bribe offer, the prosecutor allowed this case to go to trial, probably because he was either unable or unwilling to distinguish between the senator’s agreement to consider the insurance plan and his willingness to accept the campaign contribution from the fact that he actually rejected the bribe offer. Based on the analysis that separated these three speech events, the jury acquitted the senator.

So how can we know what speech event we are in? Each speech event has its required structure. The best way to recognize that a new speech event is happening is by recognizing the agendas that speakers reveal through the topics they introduce. In this case, the agent first introduced a normal business exchange topic in which the speech event structure is to identify a problem, negotiate it, and then agree or disagree to the transaction. Then suddenly the agent switched the speech event to a legal campaign contribution in which the speech-event structure is normally to identify any conditions, then accept or reject them. Since the senator insisted on the condition that he would report the campaign contribution as the law required, the agent switched the speech event once more to convert the campaign contribution into a quid-pro-quo bribery speech event in which the quid was the senator’s agreement to have the state buy the agent’s insurance plan in exchange for the quo, a heap of money for the senator’s personal use.

And why is it so important for us to recognize speech events we are in? One reason is to avoid tactics like the agent’s as he switched speech events so rapidly that the senator had difficulty knowing what was happening. But he managed to sort things out in the end, even though the prosecutor didn’t recognize how he did it.

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Roger Shuy is a professor emeritus of linguistics at Georgetown University. He has worked on more than 500 court cases over the years, testifying at more than 50 trials. He is the subject of a New Yorker profile, “Words on Trial.” For more about this case and others like it, read his book, The Language of Bribery Cases.