"It's all good. He had scissors": a brief linguistic analysis of the moment Kumanjayi Walker was shot
In late 2019, Zachary Rolfe entered a Yuendumu home and not long after, a teenager now known as Kumanjayi Walker had been shot three times and died soon after. The body-worn footage captured the moments of the shooting and what the two police officers, Rolfe and Eberl, said at the time. Pragmatics is a part of linguistics that lets you analyse the intentions of what people say. This definition works well: Pragmatics is a field of linguistics concerned with what a speaker implies and a listener infers based on contributing factors like the situational context, the individuals’ mental states, the preceding dialogue, and other elements. ( source ) However, it doesn't really require a linguistics degree to get insights into what was happening when Walker was shot, based on what the two officers said (as reported here ). Immediately after shooting Walker three times, Eberl, who was the officer in physical contact with Walker (rather than Rolfe who had shot Walker), said: “Did you-? Fu