Linguistic Markers of Influence in Informal Interactions

There has been a long standing interest in understanding `Social Influence' both in Social Sciences and in Computational Linguistics. In this paper, we present a novel approach to study and measure interpersonal influence in daily interactions. Motivated by the basic principles of influence, we attempt to identify indicative linguistic features of the posts in an online knitting community. We present the scheme used to operationalize and label the posts with indicator features. Experiments with the identified features show an improvement in the classification accuracy of influence by 3.15%. Our results illustrate the important correlation between the characteristics of the language and its potential to influence others.Comment: 10 pages, Accepted in NLP+CSS workshop for ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) 201

Direct speech, subjectivity and speaker positioning in London English and Paris French

This paper examines functional similarities and differences in the use of pragmatic features – in particular quotatives and general extenders – on the right and left periphery of direct quotations. This comparative study, based on the analysis of a contemporary corpus of London English and Paris French (MLE – MPF) , finds that the form and frequency of these particles tend to vary not only with respect to social factors such as speakers’ age and gender, but also with respect to the different pragmatic functions they come to perform in different interactional settings. The contemporary data is analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively to show how different variants position the speaker in relation to: i) the content of the quote, ii) the interlocutors, iii) the presumed author of the quote. The paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of pragmatic universals and variability in the use of direct speech

Echoes of power: Language effects and power differences in social interaction

Understanding social interaction within groups is key to analyzing online communities. Most current work focuses on structural properties: who talks to whom, and how such interactions form larger network structures. The interactions themselves, however, generally take place in the form of natural language --- either spoken or written --- and one could reasonably suppose that signals manifested in language might also provide information about roles, status, and other aspects of the group's dynamics. To date, however, finding such domain-independent language-based signals has been a challenge. Here, we show that in group discussions power differentials between participants are subtly revealed by how much one individual immediately echoes the linguistic style of the person they are responding to. Starting from this observation, we propose an analysis framework based on linguistic coordination that can be used to shed light on power relationships and that works consistently across multiple types of power --- including a more "static" form of power based on status differences, and a more "situational" form of power in which one individual experiences a type of dependence on another. Using this framework, we study how conversational behavior can reveal power relationships in two very different settings: discussions among Wikipedians and arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court.Comment: v3 is the camera-ready for the Proceedings of WWW 2012. Changes from v2 include additional technical analysis. See http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~cristian/www2012 for data and more inf

Discourse-pragmatic variation in Paris French and London English: Insights from general extenders

This paper examines the use of general extenders (GEs), such as and stuff in English and et tout in French, in Paris French and London English. We aim to compare the social and the linguistic conditioning of extender use in the two languages, discuss the different kinds of spread in the two cities and reflect on the specificity of discourse-pragmatic variation. The study shows that GE forms as well as frequencies vary across factors such as gender, age and ethnicity, while some variants also appear to be grammaticalising and acquiring new pragmatic functions. The analysis includes a comparison of different age groups, and finds that different types of generational change may be occurring in both languages. In London, forms such as and stuff and and that diverge along ethnic lines, whereas in Paris et tout is becoming the dominant variant across the board. While different variants in both languages are indirectly associated with different social categories, they perform similar pragmatic functions such as hedging, marking solidarity and appealing to common knowledge between the speaker and the interlocutor(s)

What is India speaking: The "Hinglish" invasion

While language competition models of diachronic language shift are increasingly sophisticated, drawing on sociolinguistic components like variable language prestige, distance from language centers and intermediate bilingual transitionary populations, in one significant way they fall short. They fail to consider contact-based outcomes resulting in mixed language practices, e.g. outcome scenarios such as creoles or unmarked code switching as an emergent communicative norm. On these lines something very interesting is uncovered in India, where traditionally there have been monolingual Hindi speakers and Hindi/English bilinguals, but virtually no monolingual English speakers. While the Indian census data reports a sharp increase in the proportion of Hindi/English bilinguals, we argue that the number of Hindi/English bilinguals in India is inaccurate, given a new class of urban individuals speaking a mixed lect of Hindi and English, popularly known as "Hinglish". Based on predator-prey, sociolinguistic theories, salient local ecological factors and the rural-urban divide in India, we propose a new mathematical model of interacting monolingual Hindi speakers, Hindi/English bilinguals and Hinglish speakers. The model yields globally asymptotic stable states of coexistence, as well as bilingual extinction. To validate our model, sociolinguistic data from different Indian classes are contrasted with census reports: We see that purported urban Hindi/English bilinguals are unable to maintain fluent Hindi speech and instead produce Hinglish, whereas rural speakers evidence monolingual Hindi. Thus we present evidence for the first time where an unrecognized mixed lect involving English but not "English", has possibly taken over a sizeable faction of a large global population.Comment: This paper has been withdrawan as the model has now been modified and the existing model has some error

Diachronic and/or synchronic variation? The acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in L2 French.

A majority of the early research in Second Language Acquisition focused on diachronic variation in the learners’ interlanguage (IL), that is, differences in the IL linked to a supposed increase in knowledge between two points in time (cf. Tarone 1988). The last decade has seen an increase in studies combining a diachronic perspective with a synchronic one, that is, where variation in production is seen as the consequence of individual differences among learners (gender, extraversion, learning strategies, attitudes, motivation, sociobiographical variables linked to the language learning experience and the use of the target language (TL)). In this perspective, non-native-like patterns are not automatically assumed to be the result of incomplete knowledge, but other possible causes are taken into consideration such as temporary inaccessibility of information in stressful situations or even a conscious decision by the L2 user to deviate from the TL norm

Trilingual conversations: a window into multicompetence

A recurrent theme in the literature on trilingual language use is the question of whether there is a specific “trilingual competence.” In this paper we consider this question in the light of codeswitching patterns in two dyadic trilingual conversations between a mother and daughter conducted in (Lebanese) Arabic, French, and English. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of codeswitching in both conversants shows that, despite the fact that both subjects are fluent in all three languages, uses of switching are significantly different for mother and daughter across a number of features, including relative frequency of different switch types, and the incidence of hybrid constructions involving items from two or more languages. The subjects appear to display qualitatively distinct profiles of competence in the trilingual mode. This in turn leads to the conclusion that the facts of trilingual language use are best characterized in terms of “multicompetence” (Cook, 1991). The paper concludes with some further reflections on the uniqueness of trilingual language use (an “old chestnut” in trilingualism research, cf. Klein, 1995)

The use of colloquial words in advanced French interlanguage

This article addresses the issue of underrepresentation or avoidance of colloquial words in a cross-sectional corpus of advanced French interlanguage (IL) of 29 Dutch L1 speakers and in a longitudinal corpus of 6 Hiberno-Irish English L1 speakers compared with a control of 6 native speakers of French. The main independent variable analysed in the latter corpus is the effect of spending a year in a francophone environment. This analysis is supplemented by a separate study of sociobiographical and psychological factors that affect the use of colloquial vocabulary in the cross-sectional corpus. Colloquial words are not exceptionally complex morphologically and present no specific grammatical difficulties, yet they are very rare in our data. Multivariate regression analyses suggest that only active authentic communication in the target language (TL) predicts the use of colloquial lexemes in the cross-sectional corpus. This result was confirmed in the longitudinal corpus where a t-test showed that the proportion of colloquial lexemes increased significantly after a year abroad