Resonance and engagement through (dis-)agreement: Evidence of persistent constructional priming from Mandarin naturalistic interaction

Abstract

The recent cognitive and pragmatic turn towards a dialogic syntax (cf. Du Bois, 2014; Tantucci et al., 2018) emphasises the important role played by resonance as catalytic activation of affinities across turns at talk (Du Bois and Giora, 2014). Resonance occurs when interlocutors creatively co-construct utterances that are formally and phonetically similar to the utterance of a prior speaker. This study draws on naturalistic data from the Mandarin Callhome corpus of telephone conversations (McEnery and Xiao, 2008) and focuses on the way resonance intersects with 1000 speech acts of (dis-)agreement. From a mixed effects linear regression model (Baayen and Davidson, 2008) emerged a persistent mechanism of constructional priming in the form of both formal and functional similarity across turn-takings, intersecting with both speech acts of agreement and disagreement. Our results reveal that, contrary to what is often assumed in the literature (e.g. Bock, 1986; Bock et al., 2007), priming does not occur as a merely implicit mechanism, but significantly correlates with increase of explicit engagement, creativity and sentence peripheral pragmatic marking of intersubjectivity (Tantucci, 2020; 2021). The results of this case-study ultimately suggest that structural similarity in naturalistic interaction occurs as a by-product of interactional engagement and creativity, underpinning ad hoc formation of constructional pairings of form and meaning.