Not that much power: Linguistic alignment is influenced more by low-level linguistic features rather than social power

Yang Xu,David Reitter,Jeremy Cole

doi:10.18653/v1/p18-1056

Abstract

Linguistic alignment between dialogue partners has been claimed to be affected by their relative social power. A common finding has been that interlocutors of higher power tend to receive more alignment than those of lower power. However, these studies overlook some low-level linguistic features that can also affect alignment, which casts doubts on these findings. This work characterizes the effect of power on alignment with logistic regression models in two datasets, finding that the effect vanishes or is reversed after controlling for low-level features such as utterance length. Thus, linguistic alignment is explained better by low-level features than by social power. We argue that a wider range of factors, especially cognitive factors, need to be taken into account for future studies on observational data when social factors of language use are in question.

Highlights

The effect of social power on language use in conversations has been widely studied
We find a negative interaction between Ccount and Cpower in supreme court conversations (SC) and a nonsignificant effect in Wikipedia talkpage corpus (Wiki), which is contrary to the previous findings reported by Danescu-NiculescuMizil et al (2012)
Our findings suggest that the previously reported effect of power on linguistic alignment is not reliable

Summary

Introduction

The effect of social power on language use in conversations has been widely studied. The Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles, 2008) states that the social power of speakers influence the extent to which conversation partners accommodate (or align, coordinate) their communicating styles towards them. Niculescu-Mizil et al (2012) uses a probabilitybased measure of linguistic alignment to demonstrate that people align more towards conversation partners of higher power, i.e., the admin users in Wikipedia talk-page, and the justices in U.S supreme court conversations, than those of lower power, i.e., the non-admin users and the lawyers. While these results find sound explanations from socio-linguistic theories, they are still somewhat surprising from the perspective of cognitive mechanisms of language production, because the mutual alignment between interlocutors of in natural dialogue can be explained by an automatic and low-level priming process (Pickering and Garrod, 2004). It is known that the strength of alignment is sensitive to low-level linguistic features (e.g., words, syntactic structures etc.), such as temporal clustering properties (Myslín and Levy, 2016), syntactic surprisal measured by prediction error (Jaeger and Snider, 2013), and lexical information density (Xu and Reitter, 2018)

Objectives

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion