Chameleons in Imagined Conversations: A New Approach to Understanding Coordination of Linguistic Style in Dialogs

摘要: Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles other function words in their next utterance response partner's preceding utterance. This striking level coordination is thought have arisen as way achieve social goals, such gaining approval or emphasizing difference status. But has adaptation mechanism become so deeply embedded language-generation process reflex? We argue that fictional dialogs offer study this question, since authors create conversations but don't receive benefits (rather, imagined characters do). Indeed, we find significant across many families our large movie-script corpus. also report suggestive preliminary findings on effects gender features; e.g., surprisingly, for articles, average, more females than males.