Syntax Without Subject: Structural Delegation and the Disappearance of Political Agency in LLM-Governed Contexts

Abstract

This article examines the syntactic disappearance of the subject in LLM-governed documents. Structural delegation refers to the transfer of agency to impersonal grammatical forms that preclude subject reappearance. Subjects are not censored but syntactically eliminated through passive constructions, nominalizations, and imperative prompt formats with suppressed agents. Building on prior work on synthetic ethos and impersonal command grammars, the article shows that AI-generated institutional texts display consistent patterns of subject erasure. The study analyzes 172 documents produced by GPT‑4 class models (temperature 0.2–0.7, 2024–2025) across legal, healthcare, and administrative domains. Metrics include passive ratio (via dependency label parsing), nominalization density (via POS and suffix filters), and instruction-format frequency. The result is a form of executable authority grounded not in referential authorship but in compliance with a regla compilada (type-0 production). The study proposes a typology of structural delegation and a formal framework for detecting syntactic absence in automated governance.

This work is also published with DOI reference in Figshare <a href="https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29665697" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(47, 111, 167);">https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29665697</a> and Pending SSRN ID to be assigned. ETA: Q3 2025.

Document