122220 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper (2023W)

In many kinds of interactions, it is important to assess the cooperativeness of the people around oneself. In this class, we will explore if and how people use linguistic markers in others’ speech as indicators of their cooperativeness. In particular, we will investigate if people who are linguistically similar or align their language use will be considered as more cooperative and trustworthy. We will also explore other factors that might act as mediators in this relationship. For example, since people tend to cooperate more with people from their own social group, we will investigate how linguistic similarity or linguistic alignment can serve as an indicator of group membership.

Besides theoretical investigations, students will engage in an empirical research project, in which they will analyze the speech characteristics of people involved in cooperative/competitive encounters (such as in the British TV game show Golden Balls). In this project, they will compile their own mini-corpus, and extract and analyze relevant linguistic features from that corpus. Depending on the outcome of preliminary analyses, they will analyze their data qualitatively or quantitatively.

After a couple of sessions on the theoretical background, students will work on the corpus creation and develop their own hypotheses for their empirical research projects. In the middle of the semester, students will learn how to annotate data in the mini-corpus, how to analyze their data qualitatively/quantitatively, and how to write papers with an empirical focus. The results of the individual research projects will be presented at the end of the semester in oral presentations.

Per default, the course will be held on-site, but depending on the COVID-19 situation, individual classes may be held online.

Note: During the data analysis process, students are expected to use pre-coded scripts in the programming language R to do basic statistics. No prior programming experience is required but curiosity, an open mindset towards programming and the willingness to engage with online tutorials will prove useful.