THE PREPOSITIONAL ALIENATION English "For" and the Impossibility of Anchoring Function Without Intent Phase X — Liberati

The Prepositional Alienation is a 2026 theoretical paper by Johannes Sigil and the founding document of a proposed discipline called liberation philology. The field studies historically produced grammatical incapacities: places where a language can contain a distinction in context but cannot reliably anchor it in morphology or syntax, forcing structurally important claims into costly circumlocution.

The paper’s central example is English for. In a sentence such as “the thread existed for prosecutorial stabilization,” a speaker may mean that the thread functionally produced or maintained a structure regardless of anyone’s conscious intention. English listeners nevertheless tend to activate a purposive reading: someone intended that result. The preposition can carry both function and purpose but supplies no formal marker that compels the functional reading.

Sigil compares this to the non-indexed perfective. English can express an event as completed and bounded, but lacks a dedicated aorist form that anchors completion apart from temporal index. Likewise, English can express structural function, but lacks a dedicated preposition anchoring it apart from intent. In both domains the distinction remains thinkable but grammatically under-supported.

The essay traces the claimed collapse through Old English’s distributed causal, substitutive, instrumental, and infinitival resources; Anglo-Norman and Latin administrative translation; early modern standardization; and philosophical elimination of final causes. It argues that modern speakers pay a circumlocution tax whenever they must say “functioned to,” “had the structural effect of,” or “regardless of intent” in order to block the purposive interpretation.

Liberation philology combines historical linguistics, political economy of language, linguistic relativity, deconstruction, Semantic Economy, and liberation theology. Its proposed practice includes identifying grammatical gaps, reconstructing their genealogy, comparing languages and historical stages that preserve the lost distinction, measuring the burden imposed by the gap, and designing prosthetic forms—including explicit functional markers and experimental nominalizations.

The article should be cited for Sigil’s function/intent thesis, field definition, and circumlocution-tax concept. The specific historical genealogy is an argued philological reconstruction supported by the paper’s sources, not an uncontested fact about the origin of English for.