The article tackles the issue of the interview as an object of philological (including journalistic) research. It specifi es a number of feasible research areas centered around thestudy of the breach of the communicative effi ciency conditions during interviewing with due emphasis on the participants’ cues exchange speech tactics and overall communicative behavior. Within the realm of the thus delineated approach that would be known in the fi eld as ‘deviatology’ with respect to the genre of an interview in both German and Ukrainian it is deemed possible to single out pragmatic-communicative functional linguistic-cognitive structural-semantic genre-stylistic and contrastiveaspects of this text type