Structural Divergence in Dialogue

It is often observed that people tend to match each others body movements, speech style, and patterns of language use during conversation (Giles Coupland and Coupland, 1991). Recently, it has been proposed that ‘structural priming’ should be added to this list (Pickering and Ferreira, 2008). Structural priming occurs when processing of a linguistic structure is facilitated by prior exposure to the same structure. The main evidence for these effects comes from experimental studies of individuals processing sequences of sentences. However, the Interactive Alignment Model has proposed that cross-person structural priming is a part of an automatic, resource-free priming mechanism that helps to underpin all successful human interaction (Pickering and Garrod, 2004, 2006). We present evidence from a corpus analysis that, in fact, people tend to diverge in their use of syntactic structures in ordinary conversation. There are three problems with the corpus evidence normally provided for cross-speaker structural priming in conversation: