Linguistic Style Accommodation in Disagreements

Proceedings of the Fifth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2016), pages 120–124, Berlin, Germany, August 11-12, 2016. Linguistic Style Accommodation in Disagreements Elise van der Pol, Sharon Gieske and Raquel Fern´andez Institute for Logic, Language and Computation University of Amsterdam {elisevanderpol|sharongieske}@gmail.com, raquel.fernandez@uva.nl Abstract We investigate style accommodation in online discussions, in particular its inter- play with content agreement and disagree- ment. Using a new model for measuring style accommodation, we find that speak- ers coordinate on style more noticeably if they disagree than if they agree, especially if they want to establish rapport and possi- bly persuade their interlocutors. 1 Introduction In interactive communication, speakers tend to adapt their linguistic behaviour to one another at several levels, including pitch, speech rate, and the words and constructions they use. This phe- nomenon has been studied from different perspec- tives, most notably cognitive psychology and so- ciology. For instance, the Interactive Alignment Model (Pickering and Garrod, 2004) claims that priming mechanisms, which are an inherent fea- ture of humans’ cognitive architecture, lead to interpersonal coordination during dialogue. In contrast, Communication Accommodation Theory (Shepard et al., 2001) focuses on the external fac- tors influencing linguistic accommodation (e.g., the wish to build rapport) and argues that con- verging on linguistic patterns reduces the social distance between interlocutors, which results in speakers being viewed more favourably. Within the latter sociolinguistic view, a com- mon methodology used to study linguistic accom- modation is to focus on stylistic accommodation, as reflected in the use of function words, such as pronouns, quantifiers, and articles (Chung and Pennebaker, 2007). Previous research has shown that matching of function words signals relative social status between speakers (Niederhoffer and Pennebaker, 2002) and can be used to predict re- lationship initiation and stability in speed dating conversations (Ireland et al., 2011). Furthermore, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. (2012) found that speakers adapt their linguistic style more when they talk to interlocutors who have higher social status and Noble and Fern´andez (2015) showed that this is also the case for interlocutors with a more central position in a social network. In this paper, we investigate style accommo- dation in online discussions. Rather than look- ing into status- or network-based notions of power differences, we capitalise on the argumentative character of such discussions to study how ar- gumentative aspects such as agreement and dis- agreement relate to style accommodation. In par- ticular, we focus on the interplay between align- ment of beliefs—interlocutors’ (dis)agreement on what is said—and alignment of linguistic style— interlocutors’ coordination or lack thereof on how content is expressed. Our aim is to investigate the following hypotheses: H1: Speakers accommodate their linguistic style more to that of their addressees’ if they agree with them on content than if they disagree. H2: Speakers who disagree on content coordinate their linguistic style more towards addressees they want to persuade than towards those they want to distance themselves from. Given evidence for the relationship between affil- iation and mimicry (Lakin and Chartrand, 2003; Scissors et …

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