TY - JOUR

T1 - Resonance and engagement through (dis-)agreement

T2 - Evidence of persistent constructional priming from Mandarin naturalistic interaction  

AU - Tantucci, Vittorio

AU - Wang, Aiqing

N1 - This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Pragmatics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Pragmatics, 175, 2021 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.002

PY - 2021/4/1

Y1 - 2021/4/1

N2 - The recent cognitive and pragmatic turn towards a dialogic syntax (cf. Du Bois, 2014; Author et al., 2018) emphasises the important role played by resonance as catalytic acti- vation 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 Man- darin 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 and sentence peripheral pragmatic marking of intersubjectivity (Tantucci, 2020; 2021). The results of this case-study ulti- mately suggest that structural similarity in naturalistic interaction occurs as a by-product of interactional engagement, underpinning ad hoc formation of constructional pairings of form and meaning.

AB - The recent cognitive and pragmatic turn towards a dialogic syntax (cf. Du Bois, 2014; Author et al., 2018) emphasises the important role played by resonance as catalytic acti- vation 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 Man- darin 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 and sentence peripheral pragmatic marking of intersubjectivity (Tantucci, 2020; 2021). The results of this case-study ulti- mately suggest that structural similarity in naturalistic interaction occurs as a by-product of interactional engagement, underpinning ad hoc formation of constructional pairings of form and meaning.

KW - resonance

KW - Mandarin

KW - corpus-based

KW - Speech act theory

KW - disagreement

KW - priming

KW - creativity

U2 - 10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.002

DO - 10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.002

M3 - Journal article

VL - 175

SP - 94

EP - 111

JO - Journal of Pragmatics

JF - Journal of Pragmatics

SN - 0378-2166

ER -