@inproceedings{boriceanu-etal-2026-voices,
title = "Voices and Echoes in Fictional Dialogue: A Study of Linguistic Coordination in Literary Texts",
author = "Boriceanu, Ioana-Roxana and
Iacob, Alina and
Dinu, Liviu P.",
editor = "Piperidis, Stelios and
Bel, N{\'u}ria and
van den Heuvel, Henk and
Ide, Nancy and
Krek, Simon and
Toral, Antonio",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
month = may,
year = "2026",
address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.202/",
doi = "10.63317/5ejsrqugxt2v",
pages = "2581--2593",
abstract = "This study investigates linguistic coordination in fictional dialogue, examining whether the phenomenon typically observed in natural conversation also appears in imagined exchanges created by authors. We analyse dialogues from ten English novels by Jane Austen and E. M. Forster using the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus (PDNC) to measure linguistic convergence across nine function word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon, complemented by network based measures that capture how linguistic adaptation shapes interactions among characters. The results provide evidence of convergence in both authors, confirming that linguistic coordination extends to literary dialogue. The network analysis supports these findings, revealing that alignment is generally reciprocal, unevenly distributed but widespread, and often crosses social and narrative boundaries. Taken together, these results suggest that linguistic coordination in fiction does not depend on deliberate stylistic planning, but reflects underlying cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing and social interaction."
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<abstract>This study investigates linguistic coordination in fictional dialogue, examining whether the phenomenon typically observed in natural conversation also appears in imagined exchanges created by authors. We analyse dialogues from ten English novels by Jane Austen and E. M. Forster using the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus (PDNC) to measure linguistic convergence across nine function word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon, complemented by network based measures that capture how linguistic adaptation shapes interactions among characters. The results provide evidence of convergence in both authors, confirming that linguistic coordination extends to literary dialogue. The network analysis supports these findings, revealing that alignment is generally reciprocal, unevenly distributed but widespread, and often crosses social and narrative boundaries. Taken together, these results suggest that linguistic coordination in fiction does not depend on deliberate stylistic planning, but reflects underlying cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing and social interaction.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Voices and Echoes in Fictional Dialogue: A Study of Linguistic Coordination in Literary Texts
%A Boriceanu, Ioana-Roxana
%A Iacob, Alina
%A Dinu, Liviu P.
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F boriceanu-etal-2026-voices
%X This study investigates linguistic coordination in fictional dialogue, examining whether the phenomenon typically observed in natural conversation also appears in imagined exchanges created by authors. We analyse dialogues from ten English novels by Jane Austen and E. M. Forster using the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus (PDNC) to measure linguistic convergence across nine function word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon, complemented by network based measures that capture how linguistic adaptation shapes interactions among characters. The results provide evidence of convergence in both authors, confirming that linguistic coordination extends to literary dialogue. The network analysis supports these findings, revealing that alignment is generally reciprocal, unevenly distributed but widespread, and often crosses social and narrative boundaries. Taken together, these results suggest that linguistic coordination in fiction does not depend on deliberate stylistic planning, but reflects underlying cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing and social interaction.
%R 10.63317/5ejsrqugxt2v
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.202/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/5ejsrqugxt2v
%P 2581-2593
Markdown (Informal)
[Voices and Echoes in Fictional Dialogue: A Study of Linguistic Coordination in Literary Texts](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.202/) (Boriceanu et al., LREC 2026)
ACL