Lexical entrainment
When people agree on terminology in a given conversation / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lexical entrainment is the phenomenon in conversational linguistics of the process of the subject adopting the reference terms of their interlocutor. In practice, it acts as a mechanism of the cooperative principle in which both parties to the conversation employ lexical entrainment as a progressive system to develop "conceptual pacts"[1] (a working temporary conversational terminology) to ensure maximum clarity of reference in the communication between the parties; this process is necessary to overcome the ambiguity[2] inherent in the multitude of synonyms that exist in language.
Lexical entrainment arises by two cooperative mechanisms:[3]
- Embedded corrections – a reference to the object implied by the context of the sentence, but with no explicit reference to the change in terminology
- Exposed corrections – an explicit reference to the change in terminology, possibly including a request to assign the referent a common term (e.g., "by 'girl', do you mean 'Jane'?")