The Style Game: Control, Cues, and Anchors in Real Time Speech Accommodation

Theories of speech accommodation and audience design have tended to focus on social identity functions of convergence and divergence in interaction. In this article, I focus on additional interactional phenomena that are under-studied but systematic. I present real-time data to illustrate variable control of speech features in style-shifting. These cues give listeners a sense of the default style of a speaker and their range of divergence from it, forming an ‘anchor’ from which to interpret the intended meanings of a specific person's style shifts. Rather than seeing convergence as a simple rapport-building move, I propose a system of non-linear inferential schemas, whereby the payoff of a style shift diminishes when it exceeds a certain threshold, due more to considerations of sincerity and credibility than social group indexicalities. These Bayesian inferences can be modelled within recent game-theoretic frameworks, allowing us to account for social but also cognitive payoffs and costs as part of how speakers and listeners interpret each other's speech styles in real time.