Abstract

Linguistic alignment, such as lexical and syntactic alignment, is a universal phenomenon influencing dialogue participants in online conversations. While adaptation can occur at lexical, syntactic and pragmatic levels, relationships between alignments at multiple levels are neither theoretically nor empirically well understood. In this study, we find that community members show pragmatic alignment on social support type, distinguishing emotional and informational support, both of which provide benefits to members. We also find that lexical alignment is correlated with emotional support. This finding can contribute to our understanding of the linguistic signature of different types of support as well as the theory of Interactive Alignment in dialogue.

Highlights

  • Linguistic alignment is a psycholinguistic phenomenon that causes dialogue participants to adjust their language patterns to those of their conversation partners

  • According to the Interactive Alignment Model (IAM) (Pickering and Garrod, 2004), linguistic alignment has been suspected to be a driver of mutual understanding, building up over different levels

  • While the predicted informational support level is the sum of all predictors, pragmatic alignment is indicated as a positive correlation between the first reply’s information support index and the response variable

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Summary

Introduction

Linguistic alignment is a psycholinguistic phenomenon that causes dialogue participants to adjust their language patterns to those of their conversation partners These linguistic patterns include words (Gries, 2005), syntax (Bock, 1986; Branigan et al, 2000; Jaeger and Snider, 2007), gestures (Bergmann and Kopp, 2012) and more. This phenomenon has been well examined and explored under experimental settings (Fusaroli et al, 2012; Reitter and Moore, 2007), in naturalistic discourse (Gries, 2005; Reitter et al, 2006), as well as in online conversations (Huffaker et al, 2006; Scissors et al, 2008; Backstrom et al, 2013), social media, and fictional dialogue in film scripts (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lee, 2011). Unlike in pragmatics in linguistics, our focus is not on the differences between explicitly stated and implied meaning

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