When people agree on terminology in a given conversation
Lexical entrainment is the phenomenon in conversational linguistics of the process of the subject adopting the reference terms of their interlocutor. In practice, it acts as a mechanism of the cooperative principle in which both parties to the conversation employ lexical entrainment as a progressive system to develop "conceptual pacts"[1] (a working temporary conversational terminology) to ensure maximum clarity of reference in the communication between the parties; this process is necessary to overcome the ambiguity[2] inherent in the multitude of synonyms that exist in language.
Lexical entrainment arises by two cooperative mechanisms:[3]
Embedded corrections – a reference to the object implied by the context of the sentence, but with no explicit reference to the change in terminology
Exposed corrections – an explicit reference to the change in terminology, possibly including a request to assign the referent a common term (e.g., "by 'girl', do you mean 'Jane'?")
^Brennan, Susan (1996). "Lexical entrainment in spontaneous dialog". Proceedings, 1996 International Symposium on Spoken Dialogue (96): 41–44.
^Deutsch, Werner; Pechmann, Thomas (1982). "Social interaction and the development of definite descriptions". Cognition. 11 (2): 159–184. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(82)90024-5. PMID6976880.