When hedging helps, rather than impedes, communication: collaboration in the referential communication task

• Published in: Discourse processes Vol. 62; no. 2; pp. 89 - 111
• Main Author: Dahan, Delphine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Philadelphia Routledge 07.02.2025; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Communication; Corpus analysis; Hedges; Miscommunication
• ISSN: 0163-853X; 1532-6950
• DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2024.2437738

In a referential communication task, where one participant, the director, instructs their partner, the matcher, to reproduce sequences of cards displaying geometric configurations (tangrams), directors sometimes include a hedge to their description when the tangram is hard to describe (e.g. "like an eagle, kinda"). Directors hedge their descriptions, I argue, to invite matchers to participate in the referring process by offering a candidate description, thereby mitigating the risk of misunderstanding. This claim was examined in a corpus with large variability in matchers' referential accuracy. Analysis of the matcher's choices of referent on each trial revealed that their director's propensity to include a hedge in their descriptions over the course of the task was a significant predictor of the matcher's success at the task. This finding supports the view that successful communication benefits from the actions that both conversational partners take to jointly establish the mutual belief that, for each utterance, the addressee has understood what the speaker meant.