How To Do Things With Prompts
TL;DR
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, showing a consistent movement toward indirect, implicit, and fragmentary realizations of directive force, accompanied by a decline in politeness marking.
Abstract
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 the presence of politeness markers, and the distribution of these features is compared across the two sampling years. The results show a consistent movement toward indirect, implicit, and fragmentary realizations of directive force, accompanied by a decline in politeness marking. The largest single change, a shift of 14.9 percentage points, occurs in propositional content, where explicit specification of the requested action gives way to implicit reliance on the system's inferential capacity, suggesting that users have updated their model of what the system can recover from reduced input, treating it as a competent implicature resolver. Rather than asking whether LLMs"really"understand language, we should ask: what kind of language have we created in learning to speak to them?
