‘I’ll tell you what the truth is’: The interactional organization of confiding in political interviews

The goal of this article is to examine the context-dependent nature of acts of confiding in political interviews and to identify its genre-specific constraints and requirements. It looks at their distribution in British and French political interviews with regard to form, function and possible perlocutionary effects. The communicative act of confiding is compared and contrasted with disclosure, self-disclosure and revelation, and the necessary and sufficient conditions required for confiding in a felicitous manner are examined. Particular attention is given to the genre’s status as mediated and public discourse with public and political information. The most prominent strategies for realizing acts of confiding are analyzed by comparing and contrasting implicit and explicit realizations as well as their communicative functions in the British and French data.