Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

From a sociolinguistic background Heegaard et al. (1995) find much the same as Briggs
and Wolfson; that life style or ‘cultural’ differences between interviewer and informant has
tremendous influence on the quality of the interview; leading to the conclusion that the socio-
linguistic interview is unsuitable for its very purpose of producing data for quantitative analy-
sis (ibid.: 58). Furthermore, Heegaard et al. find that not only the informants’ style vary with
social background, also the interviewer’s style will vary when speaking with informants of
different background. In their study, they show that an interviewer systematically shifts regi-
ster when speaking with working class informants as opposed to speaking with middle class
informants. He accommodates to the informant – or, crucially, to his expectancies of the in-
formant, we cannot tell. This leads us back to the problem of circularity sketched out above:
Briggs points out that member’s metacommunicative repertoires crucially effect data gathered
through interviews; Heegaard et al. point out that interviewer and informant effect each
other’s communicative repertoires (cf. also the discussion of SAT below). Thus, it would
seem, we wind up in a situation where the very language of the interview is partly a product
of the interviewer’s interpretation of the informant. That is, the interviewer needs, according
to Briggs, to adjust his communicative repertoires to the informant; but the language that he
translates to can only be qualified guesses of the informant’s communicative repertories –
prejudices as it were. Moreover, no matter whether they are good or poor guesses, they will
effect the informant’s answers. The interpretations of the interviews, e.g. in terms of cultural
or social differences between different informants, will then in part be a product of the inter-
viewer’s assumption of informants’ metacommunicative repertoires. I will return to the pro-
blem of circularity when discussing SAT’s analysis of ‘overaccommodation’.
4.1 Familiarity and routinisation
Summing up the discussions above, interviewing is dependant on the informant’s familiarity
with certain social practices. This goes from the very macro level of familiarity with the inter-
view as a speech event right to the micro level of familiarity with the usage of single words.
Wolfson’s arguments imply that the interview may prove troublesome because it is an un-
known speech genre to the informant as well as the interviewer. Briggs argues that the validi-
ty of data is dependant on the interviewer and the informant sharing familiarity with certain
metacommunicative repertoires. From CA comes an argument not unlike Wolfson’s, that in-
terviewing is problematic because it is parasitic on everyday conversation and shares certain
features with this familiar genre, whereas its data are treated as experimentally objective. Fi-
nally, from the ‘mother tongue’ example we saw how an informant’s unfamiliarity with a
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