SS22: Interaction and language adaptation

Course description

During interaction, interlocutors often adapt their communicative behaviour in response to the behaviour of their communicative partner(s) (e.g., I am more likely to call a sofa "the couch" if I have just heard you use the same word). In this seminar, we explore various aspects of linguistic adaptation in interaction. Topics include how interlocutors adapt to one another, the different mechanisms theorised to underlie adaptation, and the factors influencing this behaviour. We will also see how adaptation effects play out in different interactional contexts (e.g., multi-party conversation, human-computer interaction, pragmatic reasoning communicative games, etc). In the process, we will gain an understanding of how social interaction influences the way we produce and interpret language.