The term “interlocutor” refers to people who are speaking in a conversation. In other words, the interlocutors are the participants of the conversation.
When talking about a spoken conversation or written dialogue, it is much more useful for linguists to use the word “interlocutor”. That’s because terms like “text producer” and “text receiver” are very one-sided. They can make it seem like one person is doing all the talking and one is listening.
In the case of conversation or dialogue, this is not the case. People take turns to speak, listening to one another when they are not doing the talking. For a conversation to be successful, the people involved need to be speakers and listeners at the same time. So, it can be confusing to use the terms “text producer” and “text receiver” or “speaker” and “listener”.
Scholars use the term in all sorts of sub-disciplines of linguistics. For example, it’s common in:
- Discourse Analysis.
- Sociolinguistics.
- Phonetics.
- Pragmatics (particularly when referring to the Conversational Maxims such as the Cooperative Principle).
This is a useful term to use when you are talking about spoken conversation in an exam. This is particularly true when you aren’t sure of the names of all the people involved in a conversation.
It’s also one of those fantastic that counts as subject terminology. You can add it in quite naturally without accidentally feature spotting. It boosts your marks without sacrificing analysis.
Useful phrases to use in your analysis include:
- “To create an implicature of… with their interlocutor.”
- “To trigger their interlocutor’s schema of…”
How Other Disciplines Use the Term “Interlocutor”
Although you can usually use the term “interlocutor” to talk about everyone in a conversation, this isn’t always the case.
In the study of phonetics, scholars use the term “participant” to refer to the person in a conversation who is talking at that exact moment. Their words are the focus of analysis at that moment. So, the interlocutor is simply the addressee – the person in the conversation who is silently listening at that moment.
Therefore, it is common practice to refer to the participant by their name or an identifier, e.g. “Speaker One” and the person they are talking to as the “interlocutor”.