The pragmatics of power in an interview

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is the description of the systemics through which an interviewer makes use of different pragmatic elements, speech acts among them, in order to direct and constrain the discourse options of the interviewee.
The results show that the interviewer makes use of a series of pragmatic-discourse strategies to control the interview, but the interviewee also employs strategies of control and negotiation.

An effort is made to advance towards an analysis of discourse with a stronger predictive and explicatory power.