Finding Zelig in Text: A Measure for Normalising Linguistic Accommodation

Abstract

Linguistic accommodation is a recognised indicator of social power and social distance. How-ever, different individuals will vary their language to different degrees, and only a portion of this variance will be due to accommodation. This paper presents the Zelig Quotient, a method of normalising linguistic variation towards a particular individual, using an author’s other com-munications as a baseline, thence to derive a method for identifying accommodation-induced variation with statistical significance. This work provides a platform for future efforts towards examining the importance of such phenomena in large communications datasets. 1