Nor do these media usually include the depth of context that allows readers to pick up such nonverbal cues from more traditional literature or visual media. The result is a kind of control mark by which we can measure the level of CAT that takes place face-to-face. While phone texting seems to be developing its own accommodation markers through the numerous abbreviations and emoticons that emerge ongoing, my own informal research group at least agrees that an email from a professor to "come see me in my office about your paper" does not encourage convergence even with a perfect grade point average, although there is no literal suggestion of divergence either.
This informal control benchmark indicates how complex forms of accommodation can become. When we hear a speaker with a regional dialect we cannot automatically tell if they are affecting an accent on purpose, or for example if they grew up somewhere else and have only partially assimilated to local norms. I have another friend who really did grow up in England, but moved to the U.S. In her late teens, but her speech has never entirely assimilated to our distinctive regional standard, with the result being an idiom all her own which listeners usually try to identify with unexpected results. On the other hand, were I to move to say Boston right now and attempt to adopt that distinctive accent, my success would probably be limited enough to indicate to natives that I was a transplant attempting to fit in unsuccessfully. This desire for social approval or convergence, if discovered, would lead to negative, rather than the positive response underlying the attempt. But when I use my textbook Spanish with the Latino family who runs the market in my neighborhood, they seem sincerely encouraging, correcting my pronunciation or offering new vocabulary, which, unless they are secretly tricking me into saying swear words or something really stupid, I can only take as genuine absent any controverting evidence. These various degrees of the overtness with which speakers...
This practical application of an abstract theory has helped me realize even I too may have unwanted stereotypes I may intellectually prefer not to acknowledge, but which reveal themselves through my subconscious accommodation. While I have developed a sort of Spanish game with my neighbors at the store, this has arisen through a longitudinal series of repeated encounters in a shared space we have negotiated from complementary initial roles of shopper and worker. Speaking to every Anglo-American in a British accent simply because they are white would be as mistaken as addressing an African-American linguistics professor as "Fool" on the first day of class. CAT takes place within a dynamic, nearly infinite possible range of environmental and social contexts which speakers analyze in a constant flow of perception including roles; visual clues like dress or age; familiarity and relationship over time; and, as I discovered from this class and assignment, varying degrees of attention paid by the speaker and listener to the salience and success of different accommodation strategies. Even now that I am paying overt and focused attention to my own level of accommodation, I still catch myself performing verbal and nonverbal convergence and divergence behaviors unintentionally; at the other end of the spectrum some of my accommodative utterances seem artificial to me now especially when I set out to converge with a group of interlocutors by employing paralinguistic signaling alternatives. This overaccommodation usually goes unnoticed except with friends who have taken this class, and we have had not a few laughs exaggerating convergence and divergence utterance when we meet outside our study groups.
