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How To Do Things With Prompts

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 29, 2026 · UTC

When users address large language models, they produce directive speech acts whose pragmatic features differ from those of both everyday conversation and traditional human-computer interaction, and these features change as users gain familiarity with the systems they address. This paper applies speech act and politeness theory to a corpus-pragmatic analysis of 2,000 English-language prompts drawn from publicly shared ChatGPT conversations, 1,000 from 2023 and 1,000 from 2025, using the ShareChat dataset. Each prompt is annotated for illocutionary force, directness, propositional content, and t

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First collected: 2026-09-26T19:51:50.135Z. This is not the publication date.