Lessons in linguistics with ChatGPT: Metapragmatics, metacommunication, metadiscourse and metalanguage in human-AI interactions.

This paper discusses metalanguage, metadiscourse, metacommunication and metapragmatics testifying to users' conscious awareness enacted in human-AI interactions, based on a corpus of posts sent to Reddit's r/ChatGPT. The emphasis falls on users' foci of attention as they perform linguistic tests on ChatGPT and on how the "meta" practices manifest themselves interactionally on the selected subreddit, where human-AI interactions are showcased for entertainment purposes. The findings suggest that engaging with AI reflects and, potentially, enhances language users' metalinguistic, metadiscursive, metacommunicative and metapragmatic awareness. This awareness is mirrored in ChatGPT's output, indicative of its previous human-assisted training. Additionally, this investigation demonstrates that, when acknowledged as one subject of study, the four "meta" concepts are intricately intertwined as they may co-occur and overlap. • Posts at r/ChatGPT report users' challenging ChatGPT for entertainment purposes. • Challenges involve (im)politeness, language play, pretend play, and epistemic states. • Human-AI interactions show and boost users' conscious meta-linguistic/communicative/pragmatic awareness. • Users' "meta" conscious awareness shows on three interactional levels at r/ChatGPT. • Metapragmatics, metacommunication, metadiscourse and metalanguage are overlapping notions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]