1^st Languages Webinar
Linguistic Approaches to Human and AI Communication: Meaning, Interaction and Interpretation

Generative artificial intelligence is transforming communication at a remarkable speed. Large language models now produce texts, participate in conversations, facilitate translation, and support communication across educational, professional, institutional, and everyday contexts. Yet, as these systems become increasingly fluent, important questions arise about how they construct meaning, organize interaction, adapt to audiences, and reproduce or reshape familiar patterns of human language.

Much public discussion has focused on what AI can do and whether its output can be distinguished from human communication. Linguistic research can take us further by examining how AI-generated and human–AI communication actually work. Their lexical and grammatical choices, discourse organization, rhetorical structures, pragmatic strategies, expressions of stance, and management of interpersonal meaning all warrant systematic investigation.

Understanding these developments requires dialogue across linguistic traditions. Pragmatics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, corpus and computational linguistics, sociolinguistics, translation studies, and language education each offer valuable perspectives. Cross-linguistic, multilingual, intercultural, and multimodal research is particularly important if our understanding of AI communication is not to remain confined to a narrow range of languages, contexts, and users.

The challenge for researchers is therefore not simply to compare human and machine-produced language, but to explain how meaning, interaction, and interpretation are changing as humans increasingly communicate with and through AI. This webinar invites scholars from across the language sciences to engage with that challenge and contribute to a broader, linguistically grounded understanding of communication in the age of generative AI.