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

Wolfson supports her claims by showing that historical present tense, which is very
common in narratives in casual communication (noted through observation) is strikingly rare
in sociolinguistic interviews. Hence, the sociolinguistic interview has certain influences on
the respondent’s style of speech.
It seems reasonable to assume that an attitude interview of a qualitative kind is given to
the same fundamental problems of uncertainty about speech events as the ones Wolfson po-
ints out. Like the sociolinguistic interview, the qualitative interview also treats informants as
‘intimate strangers’ asking rather personal questions and demanding answers that strangers
would not usually ask of each other. Of course the degree of intimacy varies with different
interview approaches, however, all interview procedures share with the sociolinguistic inter-
view the quality of being partly a conversation and partly ‘something else’. Thus, it seems
reasonable for attitude interviews to make the same reinterpretation as Wolfson suggests. In-
stead of describing attitudes presented in an interview as the respondent’s ‘natural’ attitudes,
they should be regarded as ‘situationally appropriate attitudes’.
Charles Briggs’ (Briggs 1986, 1984) criticism is less than Wolfson’s restricted to the so-
ciolinguistic interview, but rather regards all interviewing with interest in social or cultural
descriptions. Like Wolfson he has a background in anthropology. Through his fieldwork with
Spanish speaking Mexicanos in New Mexico, he found that some informants coped better
with the question-and-answer procedures he wished them to participate in than did others.
Some informants presented long, elaborate, and reflexive answers to his questions, others an-
swered with an ‘oh well, you know’ (Briggs 1986: 91). Most often, the investigator’s analysis
of a society will be based primarily on the full and elaborate answers of key-informants, the
shorter answers of informants less able to fill the format being disregarded. This would be on-
ly a minor problem if all informants shared the same background and answers’ contents were
only dependent on traits of personality. However, what Briggs finds is that the informants
who give elaborate answers are the informants who speak English the best; who not only ma-
ster the language but also the metacommunicative genres of the American speech community,
i.e. its system of interviewing. The informants who are not familiar with these genres would
have entirely different ways of transmitting the cultural knowledge that anthropologists looks
for. For example, the appropriate way to instruct a novice might not be for the novice to ask
questions, but for an elder to give orders and ask questions. With the anthropologist acting as
a novice seeking cultural knowledge, we see that his method may not comply with the nati-
ve’s metacommunicatic genre. Failure to comply with the partner’s metacommunicative ex-
pectancies may lead to communication break down.
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