ABSTRACT

All language is addressed to someone, and involves an addressee as well as an addresser; it is relational. This chapter suggests that communicative relationships are generally asymmetrical, in the sense that one participant has more authority than the other(s); that differences of class or status are at issue in discourse; the relationship is more or less competitive, a negotiation for power. It examines a rather simple and clear genre of face-to-face discourse socially structured the interview. In interviews, the participants are obviously differentiated by their individual purposes, their differences in status, their roles, so that this mode of conversation exhibits an inequality, a skew in the distribution of power. For candidates, interviews are exceptional communicative experiences. Experienced interviewers are well aware that interviews are highly structured, conventional occasions. The linguistic structures for encoding are acquired in the individual's general history of socialization through linguistic experience.