La negoziazione dei significati nell’intervista sociolingustica: dinamiche interazionali e influenze contestuali nei dati dell’Atlante Linguistico della Sicilia

In this article I discuss some interactional aspects regarding the relation between the participants in the sociolinguistic interview. In particular, I show how interviewers and interviewees work together in order to co-construct the (socio)linguistic data. In this perspective, I analyse the ways in which the participants make observable to each other their interactional roles through the interview. Moreover, I focus on the relation between the individuals taking part in the interview and the invisible, yet influential members of the research group. I show how the latter may affect the interactional moves of the former, but also how participants account for the research group’s role. The analysis confirms that the linguistic data are not pre-existing objects ready to be collected. This means that interviewer and interviewee are not, respectively, a ‘phonic machine’ and a ‘source of information’. Rather, the interview is the discursive space where linguistic data are created. The data presented in this article come from audio recordings of the interviews of the sociolinguistic section of the Linguistic Atlas of Sicily. In particular, I focus on questions regarding the language uses of the speakers, their attitude about Italian and Sicilian and the code choice during the interview.