We investigate how gender affects social interaction outcomes, and to what extent gendered language mediates the association between gender and interpersonal liking. From a multimodal corpus of dialogue interactions in which participants rated and estimated likeability (CANDOR), we use inferential statistical analyses to identify expressions associated with gender, likeability, and the liking gap, the difference between how much an interlocutor likes another and how liked interlocutors imagine they are. Results reveal a Dunning Kruger effect of likeability, as well as evidence that an interaction of gender and liking is partly explained by gendered language independent of speaker gender. These findings bridge and expand previous work on liking, gender attitudes, gendered language, and likeable language. Our results suggest that aspects of stereotypically feminine language can enhance likeability regardless of the speaker’s gender identity.
Recency affects how accessible referents are, but the effect of recency is mediated by the structure of the discourse. In a series of four pronoun resolution experiments, we examine how the accessibility of referents is impacted by the form of subsequent discourse segments, investigating effects of syntactic subordination, the presence of explicit coherence markers, and typographic and prosodic boundaries. Our findings indicate that syntactic subordination, connectives, and typographic boundaries all additively contribute to whether an intervening clause is perceived as less or more conceptually integrated, and that this affects how strongly that clause blocks access to a preceding referent. However, the type of prosodic boundary was found to interact with syntax in an unforeseen way: only with syntactic subordination did a high boundary seem to increase the perception of the intervening clause as integrated, but not with coordination. Our results speak to the question of how the mental representation of a discourse is affected by the specific form of the discourse, and call for a reconsideration of intonational boundaries as integratedness cues.
In this paper, we investigate the factors that influence interactants’ choice of syntactic variants when using a predicative adjective construction like that is okay. In German colloquial conversation, such constructions can occur as full sentences with subject, copula and adjective (das ist gut ‘that is good’); with topic drop consisting of copula and adjective (ist gut); or as fragments consisting only of the adjective (gut). We present findings from a corpus of colloquial speech between fellow students showing that the interactional function of listener feedback has a higher predictive power in accounting for the use of fragments vs. fuller structures than adjective semantics (descriptive vs. evaluative), propositional structure (reference to individual or propositionally structured referent), and predictability in terms of adjective frequency. Moreover, we find that fragments consisting of evaluative adjectives show a clear tendency to be grounded in the here-and-now of the current situation, whereas fuller structures are more apt to express evaluations grounded in past experience. We argue that fragments are formally optimized to convey expressive actions such as listener feedback and other ad-hoc evaluations.
Using a videotaped corpus of semi-spontaneous interactions between French university students, this paper explores how alignment and affiliation may structurally and formally differ in the context of feedback, combining quantitative annotations with qualitative analyses. Our annotation scheme comprises several categories, ranging from modality, type, and value, following previous corpus-based models. Our findings show that alignment tends to be more frequent than affiliation, where listeners seem to prioritize comprehension signals over agreement or stance. The visual-gestural modality also plays an essential role, especially in disaffiliative feedback, while disalignment remains mainly verbal. Recurrent forms, such as nodding or the interjection ah point to the multifunctionality of feedback, whose meaning is largely context-bound. Overall, while alignment and affiliation often overlap, systematic annotations as well as micro-analyses of the data highlight subtle distinctions. This study on multimodal feedback offers insights into how listeners' contributions are essential for shaping interaction.
Theories of discourse structure and existing discourse structure annotation schemes (e.g. Mann and Thompson, 1988; Sanders, 1997; Asher and Lascarides, 2003; Webber et al., 2019) often make a distinction between propositional, subject-matter, or semantic coherence relations on the one hand, and speech-act-level, presentational, or pragmatic relations, on the other. While there have been several convincing attempts to circumscribe the space of all possible propositional relations and to subdivide it into theoretically motivated subcategories (Sanders et al., 1992; Kehler, 2002), to date there is no comparable comprehensive taxonomy for speech-act-level relations. This paper develops a fragment of a such taxonomy, which describes what we call support relations—relations that connect two speech acts iff one of them fails to achieve its goal and the other helps achieve that same goal, as for instance, in Evidence relations, where one speech act makes the proposition asserted in the other more believable. We provide conceptual motivation for the proposed categories grounded in isights from sociolinguistic, psychological, and philosophical studies of human communication and illustrate the categories with examples from naturally occurring discourse, some of which do not fiteasily into any existing classifications.
