Hedging Rule Discussions : A study on hedging and emoticons in an online board game discussion forum

Sammanfattning: In everyday language, people tend to speak in a non-committing fashion when making claims, either to save their own face or to save another person’s face. In linguistics, this is called hedging, with common words and expressions such as probably, assume and I don’t know often revealing that a hedging speech act has been performed. In computer-mediated communication, Skovholt et al. (2014) discovered that emoticons, rather than signaling the sender’s emotions, were used to hedge. This study aims to further investigate the matter by looking at how users on a board game forum hedge when speaking about board games’ complexity with the research question “do more complex games involve more hedge usage on the board game forum Boardgamegeek?” as the point of departure. Data was taken from forum posts tagged with rules. The results showed that complexity barely increases the likelihood of hedging, with a slight edge given to simpler games.