Pragmatic uses of I don't know, boosters, and hedges in text and talk

What it is about

A corpus study of I don't know, I dunno and idk, compared with the boosters totally and absolutely and the hedges kinda and sorta, in three American English corpora: face-to-face storytelling chat (Roommates), phone conversations with a navigation task and chit-chat between friends or strangers (Artwalk), and instant messaging with a task and chat (IM). Each occurrence is coded for position in the utterance, neighbouring words and function: lacking the information, marking uncertainty, avoiding commitment or disagreement, prefacing disagreement, highlighting commitment, or "I don't want to say". I don't know is frequent in speech, especially face to face and on task, but almost absent in typing, where it is lexicalised as idk, which mostly means plain lack of knowledge. The spoken forms serve many functions and often sit mid-phrase («at like I don't know 2:30»). Kinda is by far the most frequent marker and mostly marks uncertainty; totally mostly boosts commitment. Coders agreed only fairly to moderately on function (kappa 0.28–0.55).

Ideas

I1. Add I don't know / I dunno / idk / dunno to prag/data/cues.tsv as one cue class (idk), and split its two main readings with the tree. A ccomp or wh/if-clause («I don't know why / if…») is an epistemic statement about an embedded question. A standalone or parenthetical use (parataxis/discourse, or a phrase inside another clause) is a hedge. Measure hedge recall on dialogue sentences of the silver.
I2. In the QUD stack (world/src/qud.rs) and the students' dialogue layer (world/src/talk.rs), an answer turn that is only «I don't know» is a non-answer. It must not pop the open question, and it signals that the question stays open. Add this as a test next to the existing partial-answer rule.
I3. Add a small booster class (totally, absolutely, definitely, of course) to cues.tsv, so polarity and commitment can use it. Chapter 32 notes that Mova has no boosters, and boosters before an evaluative adjective strengthen the evaluation for the polarity slot. Measure polarity macro-F1 in prag eval.
I4. The low agreement on function is a warning: do not ask the teacher for a fine-grained function label of I don't know. Keep the schema binary (hedge or not) plus the act. Record this in chapter 38 §5 as a measured limit.

For Mova

32. Politeness and hedging §7.3 (boosters), 38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech §4–5 and §9 (questions and answers in dialogue); prag/data/cues.tsv, prag/src/feats.rs, world/src/qud.rs, world/src/talk.rs; measures: hedge and polarity F1 in prag eval, unit tests in qud.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5210/dad.2025.103

@inproceedings{nguyen2025pragmatic,
  title = {{Pragmatic uses of I don't know, boosters, and hedges in text and talk}},
  author = {Nguyen, Allison and Tree, Jean Fox},
  booktitle = {Dialogue Discourse Volume 16},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.5210/dad.2025.103},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2025.103}
}

References

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