Positioning Oneself in Different roles: Structural and Lexical Measures of Power Relations Between Speakers in Map Task Corpus Abstract   This paper focuses on the process whereby speakers position themselves in jointly produced conversations. The expected degree of dominancy (degree of power realization) in the dialogues is derived by the independent variable of the role of a participant xe2x80x93 a leader or a follower xe2x80x93 in a Map Task setting. We examine the participantsxe2x80x99 dominancy as reflected by a set of structural and lexical features. We then observe how the features are realized in four sex pairings: a femaleleader with a femalefollower (FF); a femaleleader with a malefollower (FM); a maleleader with a malefollower (MM); a maleleader with a femalefollower (MF). Since each pair of speakers participated twice, we also compare between the first and second sessions. Analysis of the power relations reveals that neither experience (first versus second sessions) nor sexpairing affect the power relations as much as the role of the participants; also, we found evidence that females are more prominent when they have a male as their counterpart.

How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech Does systematic covariation in the usage patterns of forms shape the sublexical variance observed in conversational speech? We address this question in terms of a recently proposed discriminative theory of human communication that argues that the distribution of events in communicative contexts should maintain mutual predictability between language users, present evidence that the distributions of words in the empirical contexts in which they are learned and used are geometric, and thus support this. Here, we extend this analysis to a corpus of conversational English, showing that the distribution of grammatical regularities and the subdistributions of tokens discriminated by them are also geometric. Further analyses reveal a range of structural differences in the distribution of types in parts of speech categories that further support the suggestion that linguistic distributions (and codes) are subcategorized by context at multiple levels of abstraction. Finally, a series of analyses of the variation in spoken language reveals that quantifiable differences in the structure of lexical subcategories appears in turn to systematically shape sublexical variation in speech signal.