Forensic Linguistics - Forensic Text Types - Emergency Call

Emergency Call

In an emergency call, the recipient or emergency operator's ability to extract primarily linguistic information in threatening situations and to come up with the required response in a timely manner is crucial to the successful completion of the call. Intonational emphasis, voice pitch and the extent to which there is cooperation between the caller and the recipient at any one time are also very important in analysing an emergency call. Full cooperation includes frank and timely responses.

Urgency plays a role in emergency calls, so hesitations, signs of evasiveness, and incomplete or overly short answers indicate that the caller might be making a false or hoax call. A genuine call has distinctive interlocking and slight overlap of turns. The recipient trusts the caller to provide accurate information and the caller trusts the recipient to ask only pertinent questions. If the caller uses a rising pitch at the end of every turn, it might represent a lack of commitment; the recipient's use of a rising pitch indicates doubt or desire for clarification. The call ideally moves from nil knowledge on the part of the recipient to a maximum amount of knowledge in a minimum possible period of time. This makes the emergency call unlike any other kind of service encounter.

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