Using Corpus-Assisted Approaches to Explore UK Police Crisis Negotiation

This chapter highlights work undertaken on behalf of the UK Police Force’s National Negotiation Group, which ultimately formed part of an impact case study submitted to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. The project was designed to showcase how ‘linguistics in action’ can inform and improve police crisis negotiation training, and explored forty-two crisis incidents representative of different crisis incidents using a combination of (quantitative) corpus linguistic techniques and (qualitative) pragmatic analysis. In addition to introducing the author’s argument for basing crisis negotiation (training) on the what, the why, and, very importantly, the linguistic how of conducting crisis negotiation (Archer & Stott, 2020: see also Archer & Smithson, 2015; Archer et al. 2018; Archer, 2020), the chapter reflects upon on the possibility of future applications and potential barriers to such continuing impact. This inspires a discussion, in turn, as to whether/the extent to which ‘practitioners’ perceive measurements of impact differently to processes like the REF (Anderson et al., 2017) and a potential need, in consequence, to (re)assess the notion of ‘impact’ within academia.