10,323 research outputs found
Divergence in Dialogue
Copyright: 2014 Healey et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC; http://www.esrc.ac.uk/) through the DynDial project (Dynamics of Conversational Dialogue, RES-062-23-0962) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC; http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/) through the RISER
project (Robust Incremental Semantic Resources for Dialogue, EP/J010383/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
Chameleons in imagined conversations: A new approach to understanding coordination of linguistic style in dialogs
Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to
each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles
and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in
their partner's immediately preceding utterance. This striking level of
coordination is thought to have arisen as a way to achieve social goals, such
as gaining approval or emphasizing difference in status. But has the adaptation
mechanism become so deeply embedded in the language-generation process as to
become a reflex? We argue that fictional dialogs offer a way to study this
question, since authors create the conversations but don't receive the social
benefits (rather, the imagined characters do). Indeed, we find significant
coordination across many families of function words in our large movie-script
corpus. We also report suggestive preliminary findings on the effects of gender
and other features; e.g., surprisingly, for articles, on average, characters
adapt more to females than to males.Comment: data available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~cristian/movie
Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social
nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational
linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article
we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics"
that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the
relation between language and social identity, language use in social
interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the
potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how
the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement
existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and
challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey
the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and
conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication:
18th February, 201
Conversational Grammar- Feminine Grammar? A Sociopragmatic Corpus Study
One area in language and gender research that has so far received only little attention is the extent to which the sexes make use of what recent corpus research has termed “conversational grammar.” The author’s initial findings have suggested that the majority of features distinctive of conversational grammar may be used predominantly by female speakers. This article reports on a study designed to test the hypothesis that conversational grammar is “feminine grammar” in the sense that women’s conversational language is more adapted to the conversational situation than men’s. Based on data from the conversational subcorpus of the British National Corpus and following the situational framework for the description of conversational features elaborated in the author’s previous research, features distinctive of conversational grammar are grouped into five functional categories and their normed frequencies compared across the sexes. The functional categories distinguish features that can be seen as adaptations to constraints set by the situational factors of (1) Shared Context, (2) Co-Construction, (3) Real-Time Processing, (4) Discourse Management, and (5) Relation Management. The study’s results, described in detail in relation to the biological category of speaker sex and cultural notions of gender, suggest that the feminine grammar hypothesis is valid
Language contact: Briding the gap between individual interactions and areal patterns
Contact linguistics is the overarching term for a highly diversified field with branches that connect to such widely divergent areas as historical linguistics, typology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and grammatical theory. Because of this diversification, there is a risk of fragmentation and lack of interaction between the different subbranches of contact linguistics. Nevertheless, the different approaches share the general goal of accounting for the results of interacting linguistic systems. This common goal opens up possibilities for active communication, cooperation, and coordination between the different branches of contact linguistics. This book, therefore, explores the extent to which contact linguistics can be viewed as a coherent field, and whether the advances achieved in a particular subfield can be translated to others. In this way our aim is to encourage a boundary-free discussion between different types of specialists of contact linguistics, and to stimulate cross-pollination between them
How humans transmit language:horizontal transmission matches word frequencies among peers on Twitter
Bridging the gap between individual interactions and areal patterns
Synopsis:
Contact linguistics is the overarching term for a highly diversified field with branches that connect to such widely divergent areas as historical linguistics, typology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and grammatical theory. Because of this diversification, there is a risk of fragmentation and lack of interaction between the different subbranches of contact linguistics. Nevertheless, the different approaches share the general goal of accounting for the results of interacting linguistic systems. This common goal opens up possibilities for active communication, cooperation, and coordination between the different branches of contact linguistics. This book, therefore, explores the extent to which contact linguistics can be viewed as a coherent field, and whether the advances achieved in a particular subfield can be translated to others. In this way our aim is to encourage a boundary-free discussion between different types of specialists of contact linguistics, and to stimulate cross-pollination between them
Reaching out to the other side: Formal-linguistics-based SLA and Socio-SLA
Generative linguistics has long been concerned with the linguistic competence of the “ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly” (Chomsky 1965: 3). Research in formal-linguistics-based second language acquisition takes as its starting point the second language (L2) speaker's underlying mental representation. Here the factors of interest are influence of the learner's native language and, in generative SLA, the operation of innate linguistic mechanisms (Universal Grammar). Similar to methodology in formal syntax, lxSLA adopts techniques such as grammaticality judgment, comprehension and perception tasks supplementing spontaneously produced oral data. While there may be individual differences in oral production, tasks that tap learners' mental representations reveal commonalities across learners from a given native language background with the same amount/ type of exposure and age of initial L2 exposure. When it comes to phonology, age has long been a central factor with numerous comparative studies showing younger learners far outperforming older learners (see Piske et al. 2001). This paper discusses a case of possible non-acquisition by L2 children who had had considerable exposure to the L2. Children's non-acquisition is only apparent, and this allows us to consider the value of lxSLA methodology on the one hand, and and raises issues about what might be lacking in the current socio-SLA paradigm, on the other. We argue that only when we return to the cooperation that marked its birth in the 1960s will we have a comprehensive picture of SLA
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