Finding zelig in text: A measure for normalising linguistic accommodation

Linguistic accommodation is a recognised indicator of social power and social distance. However,\ud different individuals will vary their language to different degrees, and only a portion of\ud this variance will be due to accommodation. This paper presents the 'Zelig Quotient', a method\ud of normalising linguistic variation towards a particular individual, using an author’s other communications\ud as a baseline, thence to derive a method for identifying accommodation-induced\ud variation with statistical significance. This work provides a platform for future efforts towards\ud examining the importance of such phenomena in large communications datasets.