Subjective Interpretation of Directive Terms: Methodology and Preliminary Results

This work attempts to capture linguistic aspects of norms, such as the 'musts' and 'must nots' that govern our daily life, empirically and provide the foundation for a general classification of terms based on their prescriptiveness. The communication of obligations and prohibitions among humans is generally unproblematic and contextualised by a common cultural background; the declaration of musts and must nots is largely interpreted unambiguously. The boundary cases between those extremes, however, have hardly been explicitly explored. Consequently, this work concentrates on the wider spectrum of prescriptions and attempts to shed light on the boundary cases that lie between the extremal obligations and prohibitions. We propose a methodology to attempt a systematic empirical grounding of directives in human language. Focusing on the English language as the most important language for cross-cultural discourse, we attempt to identify individuals' understandings for specific terms in order to determine whether a generalisable understanding of prescriptiveness can be achieved. Though this paper is primarily centred on the methodological perspective, we provide preliminary results from an initial study that informs methodological refinements.