ChatGPT's Sense Of Humour

Excellent Incompetence

ChatGPT on the ethics of Wokeism

I asked ChatGPT about the Woke practice of bullying people to be ethical. Here is its response:

Bullying individuals to be ethical also raises significant ethical concerns. Here are some points to consider: 

1. Coercion vs. Genuine Ethics: 

Ethical Behaviour: Genuine ethical behaviour arises from personal conviction, understanding, and empathy, not coercion. Bullying undermines the possibility of fostering true ethical understanding and commitment. 

Coercive Methods: Forcing individuals to act ethically through bullying may lead to compliance but not a genuine understanding or acceptance of ethical principles. 

2. Respect for Autonomy:

Just as with belief conformity, respecting individual autonomy is crucial. Ethical beliefs and actions should be based on informed choice rather than coercive pressure. 

3. Harm Principle:

Bullying inherently causes harm, which contradicts the very principles of ethical behaviour. Promoting ethics through harm is paradoxical and undermines the values one is trying to instil. 

4. Long-term Impact:

Coercive approaches to ethics may lead to resentment, rebellion, or superficial compliance, where individuals may adopt the desired behaviours outwardly but not genuinely internalise ethical values. 

Those who are bullied into ethical behaviour may become defensive, leading to further resistance rather than meaningful change. 

5. Role of Empathy and Understanding:

Ethical development is often rooted in empathy, reflection, and dialogue. Engaging in open discussions about ethical principles encourages understanding and personal growth, rather than resorting to intimidation. 

6. Teaching vs. Imposing Ethics:

Teaching ethical principles through positive reinforcement, modelling behaviour, and open dialogue is far more effective than bullying. This approach fosters a supportive environment where individuals feel safe to explore ethical concepts. 

7. Moral Responsibility:

Those who resort to bullying in an attempt to enforce ethical behaviour may themselves be acting unethically. It raises questions about the moral integrity of using harmful methods to promote good. 

In summary, while promoting ethical behaviour is important, using bullying as a means to achieve that goal is fundamentally flawed and counterproductive. A more ethical approach involves fostering understanding, respect, and open dialogue to encourage individuals to engage with ethical principles voluntarily.

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Origins Of the Modern Concept Of Markedness And Markedness vs Congruence

While the idea of linguistic asymmetry predated the actual coining of the terms marked and unmarked, the modern concept of markedness originated in the Prague School structuralism of Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy as a means of characterising binary oppositions.

Andersen, Henning (1989). "Markedness—The First 150 Years". In Markedness in Synchrony and Diachrony. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 

Halliday glosses 'unmarked' as neutral, default.

Markedness is about choice in a system: neutral/default or notable, whereas congruence is about the stratal relation between meaning and wording: in a congruent realisation, the meaning and wording agree, and in an incongruent (metaphorical) realisation, the meaning and wording do not agree. Markedness is about systemic choice, congruence is about intra-content realisation. A Theme can be unmarked or marked, but not congruent or incongruent, since there is no such thing as textual metaphor.

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Shared Protolanguage Vs Unshared Language

Protolinguistic Body Language

The System of Purview

Interpersonal control and responsibility: The system of PURVIEW in English

Yaegan Doran

Australian Catholic University

Whenever we speak or write, we are constantly negotiating control over our meanings and positioning our listener/s readers to respond in particular ways. We put forward meanings that are shared between us and the listener, such that it is presumed the listener will agree, or we simply assert meanings such that the listener’s response is only minimally relevant, or we can hand meanings over to the listener to determine and so leave it in their hands, or alternatively simply put meanings out there with no indication that anyone will necessarily be tied to them. This sharing or not of meanings waves [sic] and wanes through conversations and written text, and form a crucial resource for enacting our social relations. In this talk, I will introduce a system for understanding these meanings called PURVIEW, drawn from a recently renovated model of [TENOR] presented in Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025). The resources of purview concern the degree to which the speaker and listener are interpersonally tied to the message being put forward or wedded to its outcome. We will see that we can view purview in terms of a small sets of parameters: whether or not the speaker has purview, in the sense that the speaker is wedded to what they are putting forward or not; whether the listener has purview, in terms of whether the speaker is handing control of the meanings over to the listener or not; and whether the purview being negotiated is of the proposition or proposal being put forward, or of the linguistic act itself. As we will see, varying purview offers a rich resource for nuancing the way we relate to people in both spoken and written language, and allows for intricate negotiations of our meanings through texts. The talk will illustrate the system through a range of spoken and written texts, including through casual conversation, legal discourse, and spoken personal reflections, and will show that it is realised through a range of interpersonal systems across language, including discourse semantic systems of ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT and NEGOTIATION, lexicogrammatical systems of POLARITY, TAGGING, MOOD and MODALITY and the phonological system of TONE.

References

Doran, Y.J., Martin, J.R. & Zappavigna, M. (2025) Negotiating Social Relations: Tenor Resources in English. London: Equinox.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the intellectual source of Doran's 'purview' is the work on 'epistemic authority' in social psychology, as formulated by the sociologists John Heritage and Geoffrey Raymond, in their paper The Terms of Agreement: Indexing Epistemic Authority and Subordination in Talk-in-Interaction (Social Psychology Quarterly 2005, Vol. 68, No. 1, 15-38). The term 'purview' serves the social function of a buzzword.

[2] To be clear, the authors' renovated model of tenor involves reinterpreting context (tenor) as a resource for language (interpersonal meaning) and then modelling the resource as the language for which it is a resource. See A Close Examination Of Yaegan Doran's 2023 ASFLA Plenary Abstract.

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He literally wiped the floor with the opposition.

He literally exploded during the argument.

His head was literally spinning with ideas.

He literally eats like a pig.

He literally broke her heart.

He was literally on a roller coaster of emotions.