Describing, Motivating, and Appealing: A Move Analysis of Missing Persons Appeals

This chapter provides an overview of police missing persons appeals as a genre in its own right, as well as approaching the data from the pilot study from a forensic linguistic perspective by describing communicative functions (or moves) that exist in a corpus of live appeals and how these communicative functions are achieved rhetorically. This chapter also examines the extent to which such linguistic moves and their sequencing are consistent across appeals, given that there is no national formal training or consistent approach to appeals. Authors identified 12 different move types (broadly categorised as ‘Describing, Motivating, and Appealing’), and 55 strategies for achieving these moves.