‘Miss your painting is . finished’. Exploring the use of address forms in learner interviewee speech in LINDSEI
(2026) Réflexions sur les formes d’adresse — Location: Louvain-la-Neuve (20.May.2026)
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- Conversations are characterized by a locally managed turn-taking system (Lazaraton 1992). Interviews, on the other hand, are organized according to a pre-specified question-answer format, where the interviewer has the right and obligation to initiate interaction and ask questions and the interviewee has the obligation to answer these questions (Fiksdal 1990). This paper sets out to explore EFL learner interviewees’ use of pronominal and nominal address forms in a context where it is the interviewers who are expected to initiate interaction. The data investigated was taken from the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), which contains informal interviews with intermediate to advanced level learners of English as a foreign language from a number of mother tongue backgrounds (Gilquin et al. 2010). In the LINDSEI interviews, which follow the same set pattern, the learners are invariably the interviewees. The study combines the automatic extraction of well-documented address forms (based on Brinton 2023) from the interviewee turns with manual identification so as not to miss potential less prototypical address forms used by the learners. Information about whether or not the interviewer is known to the learners is recorded in LINDSEI and this study examines three subcorpora that exhibit different degrees of familiarity between the interviewer and learner interviewees: the interviewer is (1) familiar to the L1 French interviewees in LINDSEI_French, (2) unfamiliar to the L1 Greek interviewees in LINDSEI_Greek and (3) either vaguely familiar or unfamiliar to the L1 Spanish learners in LINDSEI_Spanish. The paper focuses not only on the actual address forms used but also on the specific contexts (e.g. direct reported speech) and collocational patterns (e.g. hesitation items, interjections) these forms are found in. References Brinton, L.J. (2023). Pragmatics in the History of English. Cambridge University Press. Fiksdal, S. (1990). The Right Time and Pace: A Microanalysis of Cross-cultural Gatekeeping Interviews. New Jersey: Ablex Norwood. Gilquin, G., De Cock, S. & S. Granger (Eds.) (2010). The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. Handbook and CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain. Lazaraton, A. (1992). The Structural Organization of a language Interview: A Conversation Analytic Perspective. System, 20(3), 373-386.
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De Cock, S. (2026, May 22). ‘Miss your painting is . finished’. Exploring the use of address forms in learner interviewee speech in LINDSEI. Réflexions sur les formes d’adresse, Louvain-la-Neuve. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/278022