The Deontic Gap: Large Language Models and the Modal Language of Obligation
Modal auxiliaries such as must, should, and have to mark necessity and obligation within the contexts of speaker authority and interpersonal stance. We examine whether large language models (LLMs) reproduce contemporary human patterns of deontic modal usage. Across three primary corpora, an external benchmark, two controlled replications, and a naturalistic eleven-model replication, AI-generated text consistently underuses positive deontic modals (must, should, have to, had to) relative to contemporary humans. Historical comparison with the Google Books Ngram corpus (1920-2022), used as a heuristic calibration against the published-prose record, shows that AI modal frequencies fall within...
| Authors | Daniel Hart, Sarah Allred, Joseph Abbas et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 9 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 August 2026 |
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