The popularity of interviewing as a method of data collection in the social sciences is a recognized fact. In their survey of qualitative research paradigms and methods, Denzin and Lincoln (2004:353) declare that “the interview is the favorite methodological tool of the qualitative researcher.” And, describing data-collection techniques in sociolinguistics and dialectology, Fuller (2000:388) argues that “much of the data in the field comes from interviews.” These assertions are hardly surprising given the central role that interviews have assumed as an essential part of the toolkit of the qualitative researcher since the early decades of the twentieth century (Fontana & Frei 2004). Interviews are the most common cross-disciplinary research instruments since they are widely used by investigators in fields as diverse as education, anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and social history, where they serve as vital research methods alone or in combination with other techniques such as participant observation. Given the centrality of interpretive and qualitative research paradigms in sociolinguistics, ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and narrative studies, the interview has acquired an even more prominent place for investigation in these disciplines. However, this research method and tool for collecting data has been the object of extremes of confidence and criticism. On one side there are those who try to erase the interactional context of the interview, believing that it is both possible and desirable to make participants forget about the event so that interviewers can access their “natural” behavior. On the opposite side there are those who argue that interviews are “inauthentic” and “artificial” contexts for data collection and therefore it is best to avoid them completely. In both extremes, the interview ends up being a problem to overcome. One unfortunate result of these attitudes has been that the interview as a real communicative event has been understudied. Our objective with this special issue is to contribute to redressing this tendency by drawing attention to the need for, and advantages of, the research interview as a legitimate interactional encounter, and taking narrative as our focus. In doing this we build on a small but significant cross-disciplinary body of mostly recent scholarship that has analyzed a variety of issues related to the use of semi-structured and open-ended interviews in qualitative research, and that has recognized the crucial importance of placing interview data in context.

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A B S T R A C T Narratives in interviews involve the alignment of two CHRONOTOPES (Bakhtin's term, literally 'time-space ') or what has traditionally been termed the narrated and narrating events. While narrators are expected to separate the there-and-then narrated-event chronotope from the here-and-now narratingevent chronotope, tropic forms of COEVAL alignment exist that erase or blur the line between the two events, as if they were occurring in the same time and place. In this article I argue for the need to map these shifting alignments in interviews. This article begins with, but then moves beyond, the familiar case of the "historical present," where narrators shift into using nonpast temporal deixis for past events. Drawing first on an oral narrative from Italy, I show how resources besides the historical present can produce similar alignment effects. In order to demonstrate more extreme forms of coeval alignment, I then compare these data with those from a Senegalese narrator in Dakar who transposes participants "into" his stories. Through this comparison I illustrate how cross-chronotope alignment reveals the way narrators manage the relationship between story and event in interviews. Mapping these shifting alignments can help illuminate the emergent relations between interviewer and interviewee and hence show how stories reflect and shape the interview context in which they occur. (Narrative, interview, chronotope, historical present, Italian, Senegal)* I N T R O D U C T I O NWithin narrative studies the interview as a research method has until recently been viewed as a problem to overcome. William Labov, for instance, famously popularized the use of "danger of death" questions, which were intended to make interviewees forget about the context of elicitation. It was believed that eliciting stories that showed little or no interference from the interviewer was possible. Critics of this approach have often emphasized that interviews are never context-free events of elicitation, with many arguing that interviews are instead deeply genred speech events (Briggs 1986) that should not be confused with naturally occurring narratives (see

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