Voices and Echoes in Fictional Dialogue: A Study of Linguistic Coordination in Literary Texts

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.

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