Imperfective aspect in Chinese conversation: do speakers imitate one another’s constructions?

Abstract Speakers constantly align with one another in interaction (Pickering, M. J. & S. Garrod. 2022. Priming, prediction, and the psychological foundations of dialogue. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 37(1). 15–37). They mirror and adjust to what others say to engage cognitively and socially. One common way to do so is through dialogic resonance, that is when speakers re-use the constructions produced by their interlocutors (Du Bois, J. W. 2014. Towards a dialogic syntax. Cognitive Linguistics 25(3). 359–410; Tantucci, V. 2023a. Resonance and recombinant creativity: Why they are important for research in Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics 20(4). 347–376). This paper focuses on how Chinese speakers resonate with one another’s imperfective constructions in naturalistic interaction. We found that increasing linguistic material between the resonated and the resonating construction inhibits durative imperfectivity (aspectually vaguer) in contrast with focal imperfectivity (more detailed and time-bound). This suggests that working memory in dialogue does a better job at encoding specific, ongoing phases of an event ( she was just entering the apartment ) rather than generic, durative states ( she lived in that apartment for years ). We found that resonance increases with constructional complexity: the longer the imperfective construction, the higher an interlocutor’s engagement with that construction. Information structure also plays a role: imperfectives with transitive or locative objects show a stronger priming effect than objectless imperfectives. Finally, we found sociolinguistic correlations among imperfective construction types, as the postverbal 着 zhe , sentence-final 呢 ne are used distinctively by Northern speakers, while Southerners show a preference for preverbal 在 zài used alone or as part of a larger construction.