What does intercultural pragmatics have to do with chatbot pragmatics?
The presentation argues that there are significant differences between the monolingual Gricean pragmatics on the one hand, and the co-construction-based intercultural pragmatics and the human-machine pragmatics of chatbots on the other. The unique nature of both intercultural interactions and human agent – artificial agent interactions generate new pragmatic features and give new face to exiting pragmatic features. The presentation focuses on the comparison of intercultural interaction with human-machine interaction claiming that the key is the nature of co-constructed interagency. That interagency is created in both cases in the process of common ground building with reliance on context. However, while in intercultural interactions all participants have the ability to initiate, direct, and manipulate communicative acts, in chatbot interactions the leading, initiating role is had by the human agent in “socializing” the machine agent. In Gricean pragmatics, which is based on conventions and norms pragmatic effect works top-down while in intercultural pragmatics and chatbot pragmatics this effect usually goes bottom-up as temporary norms and context-interpretations are co-constructed and human-agent led traits develop. The analysis highlights the interplay and nature of contribution of the experience-based cooperation of human agent and the data-driven contribution of artificial agent to the development of a new kind of interagency.