37.2821, Confs: Panel at IPC20: Interpersonal Pragmatic Approaches to Human-AI Interaction (Finland)

Fri Sep 4 12:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2821. Fri Sep 04 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2821, Confs: Panel at IPC20: Interpersonal Pragmatic Approaches to Human-AI Interaction (Finland)

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Date: 03-Sep-2026
From: Thomas C. Messerli [thomas.messerli at unibas.ch]
Subject: Panel at IPC20: Interpersonal Pragmatic Approaches to Human-AI Interaction

Panel at IPC20: Interpersonal Pragmatic Approaches to Human-AI
Interaction
Short Title: IPC20
Theme: Interpersonal pragmatic approaches to human-AI interaction

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Thomas C. Messerli
Contact Email: thomas.messerli at unibas.ch
Meeting URL: https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Discourse Analysis;
Pragmatics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

If you are interested in contributing to our panel, please send your
abstract to us by 30 September 2026 (see contact information).
Final submission of abstracts is through the IPC20 webpage by 15
October 2026.
Panel description:
Interpersonal pragmatic approaches to human-AI interaction
Convenors:
Marta Andersson (Uppsala University)
Thomas C. Messerli (University of Basel)
Call for Papers:
Generative AI chatbots have created a new domain of language use,
where users increasingly engage with LLMs as quasi-social others
(Andersson 2025 and references therein).  Today’s LLM-powered chatbots
produce speech acts, perform relational work, and display
interactional patterns that resemble human communicative behaviour
while diverging from it in systematic ways (Andersson & McIntyre 2025;
Hu et al. 2026; Lazebnik et al. 2025). Users respond to and reshape
these patterns, giving rise to new forms of discursive and pragmatic
practice (Elsweiler et. al, 2025; Kirk et al. 2025).
While research on AI-language has begun to emerge across disciplines,
interpersonal pragmatics (see, e.g., Haugh et al. 2013; Locher 2013;
Locher & Watts 2005) is only beginning to address this new
interactional domain. However, human-AI interaction raises fundamental
questions of importance not only for our engagement with artificial
agents, but also core pragmatic concepts. What does relational work
look like when one participant is simulating it? How are identities
constructed (in the sense of Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) when one
interlocutor is not typically thought of as having social objectives
or being held accountable for interpersonal discourse? How do social
and discursive norms emerge and shift in a context where interactional
behaviour is shaped by training data, reinforcement learning and
optimization for user alignment rather than lived experience? What are
the consequences of sustained engagement with AI for users’ own
pragmatic practices in human-human contexts?
This panel positions human-AI interaction not just as a new site for
familiar pragmatic phenomena, but also a testing ground for
interpersonal pragmatics specifically. As chatbots systems become more
personalized and socially consequential, human-AI communication
invites us to revisit concepts such as relationality, identity,
participant roles, and face under new conditions, in which AI
increasingly enters the social and psychological space once reserved
for human connection (Andersson 2025; Kirk et al 2025). Our panel
brings together scholars who address human-AI interaction from an
interpersonal pragmatic perspective. By human-AI interaction, we
broadly refer to any type of engagement between human interlocutors
and generative artificial intelligence. This includes conversation- or
discourse-analytic perspectives, as well as competence-focused
approaches or those zooming in on more isolated pragmatic patterns. We
welcome contributions that examine the pragmatics of human-AI
discourse in any language. Topics include but are not limited to:
 - (im)politeness and face management in human-AI interaction
 - relational work (reciprocity, asymmetry, participation) by and
towards AI systems
 - identity construction, self- and other-positioning in human-AI
conversation
 - pragmatic accommodation and convergence between humans and AI
 - speech acts in human-AI discourse
 - perception of and stance towards pragmatic and linguistic abilities
of AI chatbots
 - cross-linguistic and multilingual perspectives on human-AI
interaction
We encourage contributions on human and AI language within
interaction, rather than AI-generated language in isolation. Empirical
approaches grounded in corpus data, experimental designs, and
conversation-analytic or discourse-analytic methods are particularly
welcome. We also invite contributions that reflect on the theoretical
implications of human-AI interaction for interpersonal pragmatics as a
field.
References
Andersson, Marta. 2025 Companionship in code: AI’s role in the future
of human connection. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
12, 1177.
Andersson, Marta, and Dan McIntyre. 2025. Can ChatGPT recognize
impoliteness? An exploratory study of the pragmatic awareness of a
large language model. Journal of Pragmatics.
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2005. Identity and interaction: A
sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4–5): 585–614.
Elsweiler, C., Ziegner, A. & Elsweiler, D. From Hyperpolite to
Hyperefficient: A Continuum of User Politeness in Human–GenAI
Interactions. Corpus Pragmatics 10, 24 (2026).
Haugh, Michael, Dániel Z. Kádár, and Sara Mills. 2013. Interpersonal
pragmatics: Issues and debates. Journal of Pragmatics 58: 1–11.
Hu, Peiyao, et al. 2026. Do You Say “Please” to ChatGPT? Investigation
of user perceptions of AI consciousness and their politeness
performance in human-chatbot conversations.
Lazebnik, Teddy, Lior Zalmanson, and Osnat Mokryn. 2025. Mind your
manners: The dynamics of politeness in human-AI vs. human-human
interactions.
Kirk, H.R., Gabriel, I., Summerfield, C. et al. Why human–AI
relationships need socioaffective alignment. Humanit Soc Sci Commun
12, 728 (2025).
Locher, Miriam A. 2013. Relational work and interpersonal pragmatics.
Journal of Pragmatics 58: 145–149.
Locher, Miriam A., and Richard J. Watts. 2005. Politeness theory and
relational work. Journal of Politeness Research 1(1): 9–33.

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