Speech Communication 117 (2020) 1–12 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Speech Communication journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/specom Positioning oneself in different roles: Structural and lexical measures of power relations between speakers in Map Task Corpus Vered Silber-Varod a,∗ , Sarit Malayev b , Anat Lerner a a The Open University of Israel, 1 University Road, P.O. Box 808, Israel b Tel Aviv University, Israel a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Power relations, positioning Role Conversation intelligence Map task dialogues a b s t r a c t This paper focuses on the process whereby speakers position themselves in jointly produced conversations. The expected degree of dominancy (degree of power realization) in the dialogues is derived by the independent variable of the role of a participant –a leader or a follower – in a Map Task setting. We examine the participants’ dominancy as reflected by a set of structural and lexical features. We then observe how the features are realized in four sex pairings: a female-leader with a female-follower (FF); a female-leader with a male-follower (FM); a male-leader with a male-follower (MM); a male-leader with a female-follower (MF). Since each pair of speakers participated twice, we also compare between the first and second sessions. Analysis of the power relations reveals that neither experience (first versus second sessions) nor sex-pairing affect the power relations as much as the role of the participants; also, we found evidence that females are more prominent when they have a male as their counterpart. 1. Introduction 1.1. Theoretical background: positioning and role This paper focuses on the process whereby speakers position them- selves in jointly produced conversations. Positioning is a term coined by Davies and Harré (1990) to reflect a conversational phenomenon, defined as the process whereby speakers’ selves are located as percep- tibly and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced conver- sations. Thus, according to Davies and Harré (1990), positioning is a relative term in two ways: interactive and reflexive. In speaking and acting from a position, people bring to a particular situation their his- tory as a subjective being – that is, the history of multiple positions and engagements in different forms of discourse that they have been in. This self-positioning affects the way A positions B and the way A positions herself. Weizman (2008) calls this a reciprocal positioning. These power relations are at the core of the current study. The term positioning reflects the dynamic aspects of power relations and dominancy in an interaction, which is not necessarily congruent with the role, which serves to emphasize static and formal relations (Weizman, 2008: 13). This can be demonstrated in organizational roles in news interviews. In a television panel, for example, the host of the panel is expected to be more dominant, in many senses, than the inter- viewee, due to the static role hierarchy. However, when the interviewee ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: vereds@openu.ac.il (V. Silber-Varod), saritmalayev@mail.tau.ac.il (S. Malayev), anat@cs.openu.ac.il (A. Lerner). is the head of state (higher static role), such a panel can expose other power relations, due to a dynamic positioning – subordinate head of state and dominant interviewer. Role and positioning can be merged, for example, when the same head of state is in a meeting with his cab- inet. In practice, studies in this field deal with how the (metaphorical) voice of the individual reflects, via discursive means, the way partici- pants locate themselves in certain contexts, for example, in institutional discourse (Kupferberg and Green, 2005). Another example is the study of Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. (2012) who observed written con- versational behavior in two task-oriented settings: discussions among Wikipedians and arguments before the US Supreme Court. They found out that high-powered people coordinate less than low-powered people. Discourse analysis studies examine the way speakers project their identity and their social characteristics via content analysis. In this paper, we merge two domains of analysis – conversation intelligence (Silber-Varod, 2018) and discourse studies – to trace extra-linguistic in- formation of the individual speaker per se and the speaker in relation to other interlocutors in the conversation, by structural and lexical con- versation analysis. 1.2. Automatic detection of power relations In the field of power relations in spoken language, traditional perception-based studies focus on the charismatic attributes of https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2020.01.002 Received 19 March 2019; Received in revised form 23 October 2019; Accepted 7 January 2020 Available online 10 January 2020 0167-6393/© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.