Instructional Discourse in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: The Prompt as a Speech Genre

The article analyzes the genre-specific features of the prompt, which, on the one hand, distinguish it from instructional discourse and, on the other, allow it to be regarded as a key text type that reflects the specifics of communication between humans and com-puters. The distinctive nature of this text type is revealed through a two-component frame: a static component consisting of the source data and a dynamic scenario of in-teraction. Four types of dynamic frames are identified: prescriptive, restrictive-prescriptive, illustrative-prescriptive, and interrogative-prescriptive. Based on an anal-ysis of a corpus of 200 prompts, the study demonstrates the predominance of hybrid structures in which prescriptive and restrictive instructions are consistently combined. Particular attention is paid to the difficulties of interpreting the addressee, whose role is in fact performed by a mechanism of mediated interaction between the user and a large volume of information. The article identifies a key mechanism, which is role modeling of the addressee and the implicit construction of the speaker’s image through a system of semantic, procedural, stylistic, and ethical constraints. The limitations of the study and prospects for analyzing real user practices are discussed.