Grammar and Epistemic Positioning: When Assessment Rules

Televised interviews embrace a diversity of genres and formats. The particular genre studied here, the British football post-match interview, seems to privilege evaluation and commentary from the interviewee. This article argues that this is achieved through interviewer turns that are predominantly assessment oriented. The analysis shows the impact of this assessment orientation on the grammatical formatting of the interviewer turns and how it interacts with the sequential, institutional, and social distribution of epistemic access and epistemic primacy. Data are in British English.