{"pk":25657,"title":"Syntactic Alignment is an Index of A?ective Alignment:\nAn Information-Theoretical Study of Natural Dialogue","subtitle":null,"abstract":"We present an analysis of a treebank of spontaneous\nEnglish dyadic conversations, investigating whether the\ndegree of syntactic priming found across speakers is a\nfunction of the degrees of a?ective alignment and over-\nall positivity of the speakers. We use information theory\nto measure the proportion of overlap between the syn-\ntactic structures of the speakers. The a?ective state of\nthe speakers is indexed by aggregated measures of the\na?ective valences of the words they use. We ?nd that\nthere is a positive relation between syntactic priming\nand a?ective alignment, over and above any lexical rep-\netition e?ects. This constitutes evidence for the percola-\ntion of inter-speaker alignment across multiple levels of\nrepresentation. This also illustrates the indexical value\nof syntactic alignment, as has been proposed in modern\nfunctional theories of grammar such as Dialogic Syntax.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"A\u000bective Alignment; Corpus Study; Infor-\nmation Theory; Natural Dialogue; Spoken Language;\nSyntactic Priming; Treebank; Resonance; Valence"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/80h571x9","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Fermin","middle_name":"Moscoso del Prado","last_name":"Martin","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Santa Barbara","department":""},{"first_name":"John","middle_name":"W","last_name":"Du Bois","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Santa Barbara","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25657/galley/15281/download/"}]}