Convergence and Divergence in Telephone Conversations: A Case of Persian Anna Mirzaiyan, Vahid Parvaresh, Mahmoud Hashemian, and Masoud Saeedi Abstract—People usually have a telephone voice, which means they adjust their speech to fit particular situations and to blend in with other interlocutors. The question is: Do we speak differently to different people? This possibility has been suggested by social psychologists within Accommodation Theory. Converging toward the speech of another person can be regarded as a polite speech strategy while choosing a language not used by the other interlocutor can be considered as the clearest example of speech divergence. The present study sets out to investigate such processes in the course of everyday telephone conversations. In spoken English, the researchers try to explore convergence to or divergence from the addressee. The results propound the actuality that lexical choice, and subsequently, patterns of style vary intriguingly in concordance with the person being addressed. Keywords—Convergence, divergence, lexical formality, speech accommodation. I. INTRODUCTION 1 T is through conversation that we conduct the ordinary and perhaps extraordinary affairs of our lives. When we talk with one another, we are not merely communicating thoughts or information. Our relationships with others, and our sense of who we are, are generated, maintained, and managed in and through our conversations. We construct, establish, reproduce and negotiate our identities, roles and relationships in conversational interaction. In our interactions with others, we don’t just talk; we also do things such as inviting, asking, blaming, greeting, advising, apologizing, complaining, or sympathizing [4]. These and other such activities are some of the primary forms of social action. They are as real, concrete, consequential and fundamental as any other form of conduct [5]. Communication Accommodation Theory (henceforth, CAT) explains some of the reasons for change in conversation as individuals seek to emphasize or minimize the social differences between themselves and their interlocutors [6]. The assumption underlying this theory is that we accommodate linguistically toward the speech style, accent or dialect of our interlocutors in order to gain social approval. In later refinements of the theory, paralinguistic features (such as speech rate and fluency), and nonverbal patterns (such as eye-contact, body movement) were also included in Anna Mirzaiyan is with the University of Isfahan, Iran (corresponding author email: mirzaiyan.anna@gmail.com). Vahid Parvaresh is with the University of Isfahan, Iran. Mahmoud Hashemian is with Shahrekord University, Iran. Masoud Saeedi is with Payam-e-Noor University, Iran. the analysis, and since then, CAT has made a more fine- grained distinction between different types of (non-) accommodation such as counter-accommodation and over-and under-accommodation within the newly adopted term Social Accommodation Theory (henceforth SAT). In this way, it focuses not only on intergroup characteristics but on interpersonal features, cultural variability, and power. The major theoretical reference for SAT/CAT scholarship is Social Identity Theory (SIT), which argues that individuals attempt to categorize the world into social groups [7]. In this vein, sociolinguists argue that when speakers seek approval in a social situation they are likely to change their speech according to that of their interlocutor’s [2]. This can include, but is not limited to, choice of language, accent, dialect and even paralinguistic features used in interaction. In contrast to convergence, speakers may, however, engage in divergent speech whereby emphasizing the social distance between themselves and their interlocutors by using linguistic or even non-linguistic features. Audience design is the term Bell [8] assigns to his sociolinguistic model in which he contends that linguistic style-shifting occurs in response to one’s audience. He argues that speakers adjust their speech primarily toward that of their audience to express solidarity or intimacy, or away from their audience's speech to express social distance. Both convergence and divergence are linguistic strategies whereby a member of a speech community minimizes or accentuates linguistic differences. People may, thus, converge or adapt their speech rate, the grammatical patterns, intonation and utterance length according to their addressees [2]. One important aspect of speech convergence is its dichotomous categorization. Imagine, for example, a man who intends to take part in a job interview. He might decide to speak with a more prestigious accent in order to be better perceived by the interviewer thereby practicing upward convergence. On the other hand, the owner of a small firm might shift to a less prestigious accent while communicating with his laborers in order to reduce the feelings of difference, on that account, practicing downward convergence. An important aspect of accommodation is the level of formality with which a speaker speaks in different social settings. This has been one of the most widely analyzed areas in the field of sociolinguistics bearing on the circumstances where the use of language is determined by the immediate situation of the speakers. This stylistic variation results from the fact that different people may express themselves in different ways, and that the same person may express the I International Journal of Social Sciences 5:3 2010 199