Publications
Publication details [#41807]
Briggs, Charles. 1995. Interview. In Verschueren, Jef, Jan-Ola Östman and Jan Blommaert, eds. Handbook of Pragmatics. Manual. John Benjamins.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
Interviewing constitutes one of the most poorly investigated realms of pragmatic inquiry. One reason for its importance to the field is its ubiquity as a means of obtaining information. Briggs urges researchers to explore the norms that shape the pragmatics of discourse for a given population to determine their compatibility with the metacommunicative norms that underlie interviews. The essay also explores the link between interviewing and institutional authority.