Conceptual pacts and lexical choice in conversation.

Abstract

When people in conversation refer repeatedly to the same object, they come to use the same terms. This phenomenon, called lexical entrainment, has several possible explanations. Ahistorical accounts appeal only to the informativeness and availability of terms and to the current salience of the object's features. Historical accounts appeal in addition to the recency and frequency of past references and to partner-specific conceptualizations of the object that people achieve interactively. Evidence from 3 experiments favors a historical account and suggests that when speakers refer to an object, they are proposing a conceptualization of it, a proposal their addresses may or may not agree to. Once they do establish a shared conceptualization, a conceptual pact, they appeal to it in later references even when they could use simpler references. Over time, speakers simplify conceptual pacts and, when necessary, abandon them for new conceptualizations.

The influence of reference acceptance and reuse on conversational memory traces.

“…Indeed, speakers can resort to their conversational memory for references produced during past interactions to assess common ground and to produce partner-adapted utterances, reasoning that a reference which was successfully understood earlier during the current interaction or during past interactions should be understood again (Brennan & Clark, 1996;Clark & Marshall, 1981).…”

“…The fact that all pieces of information mentioned during an interaction are not equally likely to be remembered could have important consequences for the collaborative approach to dialogue (Clark, 1996;Clark & Marshall, 1981;Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986). Indeed, one of the central ideas in this approach is that any piece of information mentioned during an interaction is added to the speakers' common ground, which consists of the information that they share and are aware of sharing (Clark, 1996).…”

“…Indeed, one of the central ideas in this approach is that any piece of information mentioned during an interaction is added to the speakers' common ground, which consists of the information that they share and are aware of sharing (Clark, 1996). Specifically, these pieces of information are added to the common ground through a joint contribution process (Clark & Schaefer, 1989).…”

Why is conversation so easy?

“…B produces a question and expects an answer of a particular type; A hears the question and has to produce an answer of that type. Furthermore, the meaning of what is being communicated depends on the interlocutors' agreement or consensus rather than on dictionary meanings [24] and is subject to negotiation [25]. This explains why overhearers not directly engaged in the dialogue have trouble understanding what is being said [26].…”

“…Dialogue transcripts are full of lexical repetition [29], and there are many experimental demonstrations of lexical alignment [22,30]. Interlocutors start to refer to particular objects using the same referring expressions (which gradually become shorter), but they tend to be modified if the interlocutor changes [24]. Syntactic alignment also occurs in dialogue, with speakers repeating the syntactic structure used by their interlocutors for cards describing events [11] (e.g.…”