ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an examination of the structural features of talk performed as interviews. Although addressing structural features of talk-in-interaction does not seek to discover or establish that particular structures of talk-in-interaction – sequences, repairs, response tokens–work in this or that fashion, or work according to this or that rule. The economy of exchange for distributing turns in talk-in-interaction is every bit as complex as that for distributing goods and services in society, and just as dependent on the forms of life and social relations in which people live. Talk and turns at talk come to be produced for exchange with another. Unlike a conversation between friends in which asymmetry in turn taking is likely random or accidental, in an interview asymmetry is an intentionally designed and achieved feature of the interaction.
