‘‘For the benefit of the tape’’: Formulating embodied conduct in designedly uni-modal recorded police–suspect interrogations Elizabeth Stokoe * Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, United Kingdom Received 15 February 2008; received in revised form 4 September 2008; accepted 16 September 2008 Abstract This paper examines the formulation of embodied conduct in a designedly uni-modal environment: audio-recordings of British police interrogations of suspects. These recordings are made by the police as part of the legal process, and for non- present ‘distal’ recipients (e.g., juries, judges). The paper focuses on the design, placement and action orientation of the phrase, ‘‘for the benefit of the tape’’ and its truncated variant ‘‘for the tape’’. The first environment for FBT/FT phrases was the opening sequence of interviews, as accounts for eliciting ‘already-known’ information about the identity of the suspect. Subsequent FBT/FT phrases occurred in verbal formulations of embodied conduct and in questions about such conduct, to make it ‘visible’ for distal recipients. FBT/FT phrases were therefore ‘recipient designed’ in two ways: for co-present participants, to account for the formulation of ‘already known’ information, and for distal participants, to disambiguate otherwise unrecoverable spatial and embodied aspects of the interaction. The paper examines how the combination, or collision, of different interactional and recording modalities, with different categories of recipient, provides speakers with a complex set of contingencies to manage. # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Conversation analysis; Embodiment; Uni-modality; Police interrogations; Formulations 1. Introduction This paper examines the sequential organization and function of a particular phrase and its variants (‘‘for the benefit of the tape’’; ‘‘for the tape’’: FBT/FT) as it occurs in British police interviews with suspects. The interviews are audio- recorded on triple cassette tapes as part of standard police procedure for getting a range of crime-relevant information, statements, witnessings, confessions, denials, and so on, onto an official record. The analysis will therefore show how, in designedly uni-modal environments, issues of participants’ embodied conduct and physical environments are made relevant to the ongoing business of the interrogation. Let us start with three brief examples of the phenomenon under investigation. Extract 1 comes from near the start of an interview between a police officer (P) and a suspect (S); Extracts 2–3 occur some way into the interviews. www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1887–1904 * Tel.: +44 1509 223360; fax: +44 1509 223344. E-mail address: e.h.stokoe@lboro.ac.uk. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2008.09.015