Resonance and engagement through (dis-)agreement : Evidence of persistent constructional priming from Mandarin naturalistic interaction

Tantucci, Vittorio and Wang, Aiqing (2021) Resonance and engagement through (dis-)agreement : Evidence of persistent constructional priming from Mandarin naturalistic interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 175. pp. 94-111. ISSN 0378-2166

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Abstract

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.