Revisiting the Phenomenon of Syntactic Complexity Convergence on German Dialogue Data
This work provides incremental evidence for a theoretical phenomenon in linguistics, specifically for German dialogue data.
The researchers investigated whether syntactic complexity convergence occurs in German dialogue data, finding statistical confirmation in one of three analyzed datasets, suggesting some linguistic generality of this phenomenon.
We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified metric to quantify syntactic complexity based on dependency parsing. The results show that syntactic complexity convergence can be statistically confirmed in one of three selected German datasets that were analysed. Given that the dataset which shows such convergence is much larger than the other two selected datasets, the empirical results indicate a certain degree of linguistic generality of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction. We also found a different type of syntactic complexity convergence in one of the datasets while further investigation is still necessary.