UC Santa Cruz

In this dissertation I investigate the process of negotiation in conversation through the use of hedging words. My focus is on the ways we enter into and exit negotiation processes during conversations, and how we can explicitly signal this to our partners. I also examine the degree to which speaker perception is affected by the use of negotiation words. I propose that words that signal negotiation can be measured on two scales (correction and telling), and that there are words that signal more or less negotiation depending on context, conversational medium, and personal relationship.Experiments 1 and 2 are focused on identifying the scales upon which 13 words of negotiation fall. In Experiment 1, I investigate the words in isolation, asking participants to rate the words on a scale of telling-negotiation and correction-negotiation. In Experiment 2, I investigate the words in context, asking participants to read carrier scenarios and answer questions. I found that these words fall in roughly two groups - one that indicates high-telling low negotiation, and one that indicates low-telling high negotiation. Study 1 is a corpus analysis with the goal of investigating the use of I don’t know as well as absolutely, totally, kinda and sorta. I examine these words across different conversational settings (face to face, audiovisual, and text-only), different conversational types (chit-chat versus task), and different relationships (friends versus strangers) in order to build an account of how these words are used in various situations. I don’t know is most often used to indicate a lack of knowledge, and differs in forms across corpora - idk is more often used in the text-based corpus, compared to I dunno and I don’t know in the spoken corpora. Experiment 3 investigates how perceptions of the speaker change when negotiation words are used. Authority is manipulated using a professor - TA - student manipulation, and perceptions of knowledgeability, politeness, friendliness, and professionalism are probed. When looking at knowledge, the words that are low-telling high negotiation lower the perceived knowledge of the speaker, but the words that are high-telling low negotiation do not boost the perceived knowledge of the speaker. For friendliness and professionalism, clearly and obviously emerge as markers of speaker feeling, and for professionalism, peers are given more leeway than those with higher perceived authority. Understanding how we signal negotiation to our conversational partners, as well as what social effects these cues might have, has implications for understanding not just human interaction but human-computer and artificial agent interaction as well. Boosters and hedges, long examined as separate phenomena, can be categorized based on the negotiation functions they serve and the social effects they have.