This genre analysis aimed to investigate the different linguistic features, cohesive devices, linguistic moves as well as narrative structures found in legal discourse specifically, police reports.  The gathered linguistic corpora from the selected police stations in Davao del Norte were analyzed, categorized and interpreted through the lens of Finnegans language structure and use, Halliday and Hasans Texts Connected Theory, Labov and Walezkys Narrative Theory and Riberios moves of police reports. Results showed that the linguistic features found in police reports are technical jargon, archaic expression, doublet, compounding, formality, derivational morpheme, and sentence complexity. The identified syntactic features are passives, prepositional phrases, unique determiners, parallel structure, participle, and relative clauses. Using the Text Connected Theory, the identified cohesive devices are reference, conjunctive elements, substitution, and lexical cohesion. Two types of reference are also identified such as cataphoric and esphoric reference. Conjunctive elements are also categorized into four namely, additive, temporal, adversative, and causal conjunctive. The lexical cohesion found are reiteration and collocation. As to linguistic moves, four linguistic moves were present in writing police reports such as move 1) Identifying and situating the agency, the Police Report (PR) and its circumstances move 2) classifying the fact and its circumstances move 3) narrating (reporting) the facts and move 4) identifying the personnel responsible of the report. Narratives are also framed according to Labov and Walezkys Narrative Theory consisting of six elements such as abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda. Exploring the genre of police reports equips officers in understanding the specific conventions that facilitate law enforcement documentation. Genre analysis essentially helps police officers in identifying and navigating these requirements, ensuring that the produced reports from their stations are not only informative but also meet the necessary legal requirements. The meticulous process of creating narratives is not merely a bureaucratic duty, but rather a critical aspect of ensuring and maintaining accountability, integrity and public trust of the criminal justice system.  

police reports

genre analysis

legal discourse

Linguistic features