Verbal Communication of a Person with a Chatbot as a Discursive Practice in the Era of Digitalization: a Pragmatic Aspect

Abstract

Based on the analysis of users dialogues and chatbots presented on the websites of German commercial firms, the article describes the linguistic and pragmatic features of human interaction with «virtual assistants», specifies the characteristics of chatbots and the texts generated by them, characteristics that make interactions anthropomorphic, and the parameters are also determined that indicate the artificiality of the communication between the client and the chatbot. The interaction of the user and the program created on the basis of artificial intelligence is carried out using the language of «daily people communication», therefore, this communicative interaction is considered in the article as a separate discursive practice with its own characteristics. The article notes that so far, when studying the interaction of customers and chatbots, the main focus has been on technical, economic and social aspects, but not linguistic ones. The empirical study of user dialogues with «virtual assistants» presented in the work contains conclusions that are of interest for formulating recommendations to clients who turn to communication services in order to obtain information about any product or service, as well as to representatives of Internet commerce and IT developers, who are developing concepts for using chatbots in sales.