The Purposes of Language
It’s why we speak or write that matters; do AI models of language have such purposes?
At this time of new Large Language Models purported to exemplify Artificial Intelligence, I think it is important for us humans to remind ourselves about why we use language — what linguists call the pragmatics of language.
Our uses of language have many purposes, sometimes overlapping and sometimes conflicting.
My introduction to the pragmatics of language was reading John Austin’s classic book, “How To Do Things With Words” (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1962). In it, as I recall, he used the term “speech acts” to describe the intentional actions that we carry out, or attempt to carry out, when we make spoken or written utterances.
Austin also made an important distinction between “illocutionary speech acts” and “perlocutionary effects” of speech acts. For example, we can inform and perhaps warn someone that “It is raining outside”. Those are illocutionary acts. But our effects on the hearer may be to persuade them, or to deceive them. Those are perlocutionary effects.
The distinction between illocutionary speech acts and their perlocutionary effects has to do with how the speaker’s or writer’s intentions are accomplished. The intentions of an illocutionary act are accomplished if the hearer or reader…
