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Pragmatics beyond humans
Pragmatic meaning relies on communicative situatedness: knowing who you are, what you want, and what the other party understands. LLMs lack this situatedness, making their pragmatic outputs structurally different from human communication.
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Pragmatic meaning relies on communicative situatedness that LLMs lack. Gvoždiak examines what it means to communicate pragmatically: to intend something, to recognise that the other party intends it, and to act on that mutual recognition. LLMs can produce pragmatically plausible outputs without any of these conditions being met. Their pragmatics is structural mimicry, not situated meaning-making.
Published 2025.