Coding Sentience: Ares's Linguistic Evolution Through Jakobson's Functions of Language in Tron: Ares

This paper examines the 2025 sci-fi film Tron: Ares, which reverses the Tron series’ key idea by having an independent A.I. program named Ares travel from the digital world, i.e. “the Grid,” into the physical world. It is maintained that this physical transition leads to a profound linguistic crisis, forcing Ares to adapt from a world of pure code to the ambiguous, context-dependent and emotionally complex ecosystem of human communication. Employing Roman Jakobson’s (1960) model of the six functions of language, this paper proposes the view that Ares’s journey from A.I. to personhood is dramatized by his progressively expanding linguistic capabilities. The analysis first establishes Ares’s baseline as a ‘program’ with a ‘hollow’ linguistic profile, limited almost exclusively to the Referential and Conative functions. It then explores his gradual acquisition of the ‘human’ functions: the Emotive (expressing internal feelings, such as appreciating art), the Phatic (managing social contact), and the Metalingual (deciphering the ‘human code’). The paper demonstrates that Ares achieves near-full sentience by mastering this new linguistic toolkit he acquires—strategically violating the Referential function and taking the Conative function beyond command to negotiation. It is concluded that Tron: Ares defines humanity not merely as the capacity to feel (Emotive), but as the drive to connect (Phatic) and the ability to craft a unique identity through the Poetic function, an evolution epitomized by his final creative act of writing a postcard.