@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://preview.aclanthology.org/cawl-year/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."
}