Alignment as the Basis for Successful Communication

Pickering and Garrod (2004) argued that alignment is the basis of successful communication in dialogue. In other words, successful communication goes hand-in-hand with the development of similar representations in the interlocutors. But what exactly does this mean? In this paper, we attempt to define alignment, contrasting alignment of situation models with alignment of linguistic representations. We then speculate on how these notions are related and why they lead to conversational success

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