Alignment and empathy as viewpoint phenomena: The case of amplifiers and comical hypotheticals

Kurt Feyaerts; Bert Oben; Helmut Karl Lackner; Ilona Papousek

doi:10.1515/cog-2016-0109

Article

Alignment and empathy as viewpoint phenomena: The case of amplifiers and comical hypotheticals

Kurt Feyaerts , Bert Oben , Helmut Karl Lackner and Ilona Papousek

Published/Copyright: July 14, 2017

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From the journal Cognitive Linguistics Volume 28 Issue 3

Abstract

This contribution focuses on verbal amplifiers and comical hypotheticals in a corpus of face-to-face interactions. Both phenomena qualify as markers of a mental viewpoint expressing an (inter)subjective construal of a certain experience. Whereas amplifiers offer a straightforward view onto a speaker’s evaluative stance, comical hypotheticals provide an intersubjective account of a viewpoint construal. As part of their meaning, their use reveals a speaker’s assumption about the interlocutor willing to allow or participate in a particular type of interactional humor. Our research interest for these phenomena concerns their occurrence as well as their interactional alignment in terms of mimicry behavior. In order to capture the impact of both linguistic and psychological variables in the use of these items, we adopt a differentiated methodological approach, which allows to correlate findings from our corpus linguistic analysis with the values obtained for interpersonal difference variables. As our data consists of male dyads of which the participants never met before the beginning of their conversation, we expected to witness an increase, along with the growing familiarity among the interlocutors, in both the use and alignment of these viewpoint phenomena. Indeed, results show a clear increase in the use of both verbal amplifiers and comical hypotheticals over the course of the interaction and independently from the also observed overall increase of communicativeness. However, with respect to the alignment of both viewpoint phenomena, our study reveals a differentiated result. Participants aligned their use of verbal amplifiers with that of their partners over the course of the interaction, but they did not do so for comical hypotheticals. Yet, within the broader discussion of the experiment’s design, this unexpected result may still seem plausible with respect to our general hypothesis. Beyond the limits of this study, the set-up and results of our study nicely connect to recent research on empathy-related behavior in social neuroscience.

Keywords: alignment; verbal amplifiers; comical hypotheticals; empathic behavior; personality traits

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Received: 2016-9-20

Revised: 2017-2-28

Accepted: 2017-3-16

Published Online: 2017-7-14

Published in Print: 2017-8-28

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https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2016-0109

Keywords for this article

alignment; verbal amplifiers; comical hypotheticals; empathic behavior; personality traits