Face-threatening acts in the sociolinguistic interview: a comparative study between free and structured interviews.

The sociolinguistic interview is one of the most commonly used methods for obtaining samples intended for the study of spoken language. However, various authors have pointed out that interviews do not provide adequate material for the analysis of certain conversational language phenomena. Mitigating politeness would be one of these phenomena, as, due to their situational characteristics, interviews rarely produce face-threatening acts. Based on a sample of interviews, this work highlights how the different strategies employed by interviewers largely determine the type of linguistic phenomena that appear in the resulting materials. Specifically, it shows how in more flexible, informal, and unstructured interviews, there are numerous and varied examples of face-threatening acts, making this kind of interview suitable material for the study of certain phenomena related to politeness.