Dialogic resonance, when speakers reproduce constructions from prior turns, is a compelling type of coordination in everyday conversation. This study takes its starting point in resonance in stance-taking sequences with the aim to account for the interplay between intersubjective motivations and cognitive facilitation in resonance production. It analyzes stance-taking sequences in the London–Lund Corpus 2, determining (i) the type of stance alignment (agreement or disagreement), and (ii) the time lapse between the stance-taking turns. The main findings are, firstly, that resonance is more likely than non-resonance to be used by speakers who express disagreement than agreement, which we interpret as a mitigating function of resonance, and, secondly, that the turn transitions are faster in resonating sequences due to cognitive activation in the prior turn. We propose that the face-saving intersubjective motivation of resonance combines with its facilitating cognitive effect to promote appeasing communication.

In the process of compiling a new corpus of contemporary spoken British English, the London–Lund Corpus 2, we hit upon a construction used in the conversations recorded that had not previously been dealt with in the literature, namely the reactive what-x construction. Prompted by this discovery, we carried out a detailed analysis of its properties and constraints within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics, namely Construction Grammar, and found that the reactive what-x construction features the interrogative what directly followed by a phrasal or clausal complement x. Moreover, what forms one tone unit with the complement and never carries a nuclear pitch accent. The core meaning is to signal an immediate reaction to something said by another speaker in the preceding turn, and the dialogic functions include questions proper as well as expressions of disagreement. The two contributions of this study are: (i) to provide a definition of the reactive what-x construction and (ii) to propose a crucial theoretical extension of Construction Grammar involving a broadening of the concept of construction to cover not only the lexical–semantic pairing but also prosodic properties and the role of the construction in the interactive dialogic space in speech.