Inna Livytska

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and their ability to generate content align with both perspectives: AI as a powerful assistant and AI as a potential challenge to human cognition. However, these advancements expose the persistent limitations of AI compared to humans. One such limitation, as demonstrated by the folk narrative hypothesis (Hut-to 2008), is the uniquely human ability to engage in storytelling, a fundamental and ancient mechanism for memory, information storage, identity formation, and world-making or world-disruption. The ability of AI to generate coherent texts is often mistaken for its intelligence, raising false 140 Inna Livytska claims about AI self-consciousness and sentience. The paper argues that human narrative intelligence as a drive for sense-making might turn imperfect AI text generation into a meaningful construct despite cognitive dissonance in the communication. By analysing the technical prompts used by ChatGPT-4 to generate narrative text and its understanding of key text production categories (coherence, fluency, complexity, etc.) within the 5E Cognition framework (Stilwell & Harman 2019), I will attempt to show how AI-generated narrative structures acquire full and meaningful interpretation when perceived by a human. The generative ability of AI, which emerges in co-communication with a human, cannot serve as a proxy for its intelligence, since it reflects human perception and our intrinsic ability to hypothesise and engage with communication agents.

Advancements in modern “post-classical narratology” have undergone unprecedented growth in the last two decades, giving rise to various directions of narratological research within the cognitive and diachronic domains. One such approach is biosemiotics, which appeared at the crossroads of semiotics and cultural biology and combines a set of definitions for meaning-making and agency construction in philosophy, linguistics, culture, and all complex systems. Agency here represents any kind of subject activity (e.g., epistemic, cognitive, etc.) that can be determined by the indices and icons of subjectivity at the level of the storyline development and then compared at the level of the discourse. From the biosemiotic approach, the narrative discourse as a complex system is characterised by the meaning emergence and telic behavior of all its constituent parts striving at closure and a certain goal, i.e., having some agenda. Thus, the agency is supplementary to the acting of the self-reflecting subject in terms of intentionality, self-referentiality, and self-governing activity. Following the above definition of agency, this paper examines the possible ways of applying Peircian triadic sign theory to narrative agency construction in the contemporary novel “Asymmetry” (2018) by Lisa Halliday, operating with the notions of bodily and biosemiotic agency. Seeing subjectivity related to perspective-taking in the narrative discourse, it is important to trace the distribution of the icons and indexes of subjectivity on three levels: semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic.

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the use of hedging in a corpus of articles from applied linguistics, and in this sense, it is complementary to the previous research of academic persuasion in research articles (Hinkel, 1997; Hyland, 1996, 2004). This study examined the types and frequency of hedges employed by the authors of academic research articles (RAs) in the field of applied linguistics. A corpus consists of 20 research articles, randomly selected from the Open Access Journals on Educational linguistics (5 RAs), Psycholinguistics (5 RAs), Sociolinguistics (5 RAs) and Pragmatics (5 RAs) The data were manually coded according to Hyland’s taxonomy of hedges and hedging devices (Hyland,1996) and then formatted to calculate the frequency and type of hedges in RAs on Applied Linguistics. Results of the study indicate that reader-oriented hedges constitute the main pragmatic type of hedges in RAs in the field of applied linguistics, recognizing the need for reader’s ratification of the author’s claims and politeness conventions of academic discourse per se. Combination of qualitative and quantitative methods applied to computer readable data proved that hedges in RAs on Applied Linguistics are topic dependent, showing differences in typology, frequency and distribution even within one discipline.

The paper outlines the emergence of biosemiotics (global semiotics, cyber semiotics) a new scientific approach, which appeared in a result of transformation in the scientific paradigms at the end of the XX century and the beginning of the XXI century. The author also highlights the reasons for such emergence and the potential of biosemiotics in analyzing autopoietic sign systems. The essence of biosemiotics as a science of organic sign systems and its status in the humanitarian knowledge paradigm has been defined. The application of analytical and interpretative methods, in combination with the historical approach, allowed us to trace a chronology of biosemiotics formation as well as its modern state of the art. It has been contended, due to a synergy of biology and semiotics, philosophy, and ethics, modern sign theory broadened its focus to the research in all alive sign systems (Thomas A. Sebeok, 2000) and acquired a new name “biosemiotics”. The prospects of future research lie in applying methods of biosemiotics to narrative discourse analysis

The paper aims at disclosing the process of writer identity enactive construal in narrative writing. Three constituent parts of identity discoursal construction in the narrative are social semiotics as a reflection of the social environment, cultural identity theory as the embodiment of cultural choices and preferences, and pragmatics (Charles S. Peirce). The following research questions have been formulated: (1) What is the nature of identity construction? (2) What rhetorical factors influence identity construal in narrative discourse? By providing a step-by-step analysis of thematic structure, the paper conducts a discourse analysis of narrative episodes in terms of Agent, Process, and Medium triad (Halliday, 1973), reflecting the mechanisms of reader’s manipulation with information as a dynamic semiotic process of interpretation, limited by a final interpretant.

The last two decades of the new millennium have witnessed a renaissance of interest in the topic of narrative in the view on language as an artificially created system of signs, expressing a feeling/perceiving and speaking subject. This paper synthesizes the growing bulk of work in linguistics and related disciplines (e.g. cognitive linguistics, literary theory, AI) commanded by the centrality of the writer/speaker/performer of the story in an attempt to approach the process of world creation, by comparing narrative models of story-generating programs, based on the frames and scenarios simulating sentence grammar. In this way, artificial intelligence techniques/algorithms in story generation incorporate planning/solving strategies and grammar production, rooted in the narrative structuralist framework (Vladimir Propp). Subsequently, formal and structural limitations of the approach to the question of narration generation in AI disclose the conceptual key problems of artificial narrative intelligence (AnI). Considering examples of patterns in story generation programs and corresponding fiction narrative models, this paper compares computational linguistic and philological approaches to narrative construct within literary theory of story world creation.