While most studies on hedging have focused on gender as the determining factor on hedging use in informal contexts (e.g., Coates, 1996; Holmes, 1995), a more primary factor may in fact be "group size." Although the factor has received no attention in the literature, it seems to play a key role both in the frequency of hedging as well as the function of hedging in my corpus.
Twenty-five Japanese people participated in this study; six key participants and 19 interlocutors. The six key participants tape-recorded casual conversations with close friends twice, without control for the number of participants. There were 12 conversation groups in my study, of three group sizes: groups of 2 people, groups of 3 people and groups of 4 people. Then, the range of hedges, their functions, and their strategic use were examined in relation to the group size.
Intuitively, one might hypothesize that the greater the number of participants in a group, the greater the number of hedges because each group member would contribute roughly the same number of hedges to a conversation. However, the actual hedging behaviors of my subjects stood in stark contrast to such a hypothesis: The smaller the group size, the more the group hedged. Furthermore, there was a noticeable relationship between group size and number of interpersonal hedges: The smaller the group, the greater the number of hedges used for minimizing negative effects on a listener; the larger the group, the greater the number of hedges used for conversation management. Possible reasons for these findings are discussed in terms of conversation topic, speakers' goals and maintenance of conversation flow.
This study highlights the importance of group size which directly affects group members' hedging use, as well as the necessity of fully taking into account the factor when interpreting hedging behavior accurately.