The next time you find yourself in
a waiting room, train station, or airport, find a comfortable seat and listen
to people speak. There are a lot of
interesting things going on in the language people use. One of them is the use of hedges.
A hedge is a marker of uncertainty
in language. Imagine the following
situation: A parent questions a teenage
child on a Sunday morning. He says,
“What time did you come home last night?”
The teenager might respond in a number of ways.
“I got home at midnight.”
“I got home at around midnight.”
“I got home at midnight, I think.”
“I got home at, like, midnight.”
The first answer has no hedge in
it. The next two sentences use the
hedges ‘around’ and ‘I think.’ Both of
these hedges are a way of saying that the answer is approximate and that it may
not be exactly correct. The last answer
uses the word ‘like.’ It is less clear
what the word ‘like’ is doing in this sentence.
It might be a hedge as well, though it might just be a way of
emphasizing what is being said.
Do these hedges matter?
This question was explored by Kris
Liu and Jean E. Fox Tree in a paper in the October, 2012 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. These researchers suggested that hedges might
call attention to the information that they mark, and so that information might
be well-remembered by listeners. At the same time, hedges might mark
information as unreliable, and so the information might not be retold by
listeners later.
In one study, Liu and Fox Tree
looked at whether information would be retold by listeners. In this study, two participants came to the
lab. At the start of the study, one
participant was asked to tell a story (for example, a story about a large
purchase they had made recently). After
telling this story, both the teller and the listener were brought into separate
rooms and were asked to retell the story.
Then, the pair did this again, only now the listener from the first part
of the study told a story.
The researchers were particularly
interested in people’s memories for numbers that were used in the original
story. Would these quantities be put in
the story when it was retold?
When people used a quantity in the
story without a hedge (“The shirt cost $15.”) it was quite likely to be used in
a retelling of the story both by the original speaker and by the listener. Quantities with a ‘like’ (“The shirt cost,
like, $15.”) were also used in retellings.
Quantities that were hedged (“The shirt cost around $15.”) were not
included in retellings of the story.
So far, that makes sense. When you use a hedge, it marks the
information as unreliable, so you would expect that it would not be included as
a detail when retelling a story.
In a second study, one of the
stories told by a participant in the first study was played for a new group of
participants. The story had many
quantities in it. Some of them involved
hedges and some involved ‘likes.’ In
some versions of the story, the hedges were removed from the recording. In other versions the ‘likes’ were
removed. After people heard the story,
they were asked specific questions about the story that involved the quantities
(“How much did the shirt cost?”)
When the quantity had a “like”
with it, it was equally well remembered, regardless of whether the “like” was
present in the recording. Interestingly,
when the quantity had a hedge with it, it was actually better remembered when
the hedge was there than when it was not.
That means that the hedge caused the information to be better remembered,
even though that information was not used later in a retelling of the story.
Why would this happen?
Hedges cause people to think more
about the information that is hedged. In
order to understand what the hedge is doing, you have to work a little harder
to figure out why the speaker would want to qualify what they are saying. The more work you put into something, the
more likely you are to remember it later.
However, once you understand the
hedge, you realize that it is telling you that the quantity is just
approximate. So, you may remember that
quantity better, but you also realize that you do not need to treat it as an
exact number. As a result, you may not
pass it along to other people.
Finally, the word ‘like’ does not
seem to work the same way as other hedges.
One reason for that is that ‘like’ has become a crutch that many people
use when they are speaking. They fill
lots of space in their speech with the word ‘like.’ As a result, it may not have any specific
meaning for listeners.
