Whose loss? Whose fault? The language of insurance claims adjustments, from interview to final report

Insurance adjusters in the United States act as independent third parties, interviewing accident victims to establish an accurate report of events and to judge whether the testimony is reliable. In this context, this work serves as an investigation of how to contextualize the language of insurance claim adjustments, in the attempt to identify areas of linguistic inquiry and to highlight the relationship between assessment interview questioning and interrogation questioning. On the basis of both an oral and a written corpus, the analysis reveals the presence of highly predictable wording, formulaic question types and sequencing of interrogatives to establish and confirm shared knowledge in the telephone interviews. In addition, data show that reporting verbs are often used in reports in order to skilfully qualify information reported in the prior sentence as being tenous. Overall, findings suggest that language use in the setting of insurance claims points to generic hybrids defining themselves somewhere between neutral business sector institutional discourse and investigative paralegal discourse.