Author confidence and claim credibility
How does hedging influence reader perception?
Keywords: hedging, reader perception, academic texts, university writing, Estonian
Hedges are linguistic devices that allow the author of a text to express uncertainty about a given claim and leave room for reader interpretation. Although hedges in Estonian have been studied using corpus data, little attention has been paid to how readers perceive these linguistic devices. The aim of this study is to find out whether and how different hedges influence the perception of the author’s confidence and the credibility of their claims. To investigate this, I conducted an experiment in which student readers were asked to evaluate the author’s confidence and the credibility of claims in sentences containing hedges. The study focuses on the following verbs and constructions: oletan ‘I suppose’, võib oletada ‘may suppose’, võib öelda ‘may say’, võibki oletada ‘it might indeed be supposed’, võibki öelda ‘it might indeed be said’, oletaksin ‘I would suppose’, ütleksin ‘I would say’, võiks oletada ‘might suppose’, võiks öelda ‘might say’.
The participants (n = 45), students from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Tartu, were asked to evaluate statements containing hedges in terms of the author’s confidence and the credibility of the claim and to rank the statements based on perceived confidence. The results showed that statements using the conditional mood (võiks oletada, võiks öelda) were considered significantly more uncertain than others. Significant differences in confidence ratings were also found between other types of hedges. However, no clear differences emerged in credibility ratings. A comparison of ratings of author confidence and claim credibility showed that high confidence does not guarantee high credibility: significant differences between these two ratings were found for unhedged claims and for claims containing võib öelda. The ranking tasks confirmed the results of the evaluation tasks, showing that statements containing the conditional mood (võiks oletada, võiks öelda, oletaksin, ütleksin) were perceived as the least confident.
Nele Karolin Teiva (b. 2000), MA, University of Tartu, Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, Junior Research Fellow in Linguistics (Jakobi 2-431, 51005 Tartu), nele.teiva@ut.ee
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