Prohibition boundaries

Updated 3 October 2026: concept, except_when, claim, definition … sufficient, and default strength have been removed, together with their special deprecation diagnostic. References below to the former behavior and corpus sources are historical. New source uses relation, unless, duty, a strict rule, and defeasible.

What the construct does NOT do in 0.2: scope, reserved values, neighbouring constructs, and the selection rule.

OverviewBoundariesCorpus formsPitfalls

Does not

• Is not a fifth modality. In the record a prohibition is a modality: "duty" node with goal.kind: "forbearance": form, not theory. There is no separate “prohibition” lifecycle — the cycle is shared.
• Is not breached by silence. A breach is only an established action fact inside the window. Before the window — PENDING, after the window without completeness — UNDETERMINED; SATISFIED requires a completeness certificate.
• Is not defeated by permission alone. A forbearance/liberty conflict with no priority is UNRESOLVED_NORMATIVE_CONFLICT.
• Does not act outside its rule. At legal_time outside the rule’s effective there is no position at all — unlike legal_time outside window, where there is one.
• Does not read deadline in its goal. The only deadline word in the grammar is the deadline policy declaration; deadline @…; inside goal is dropped with warning LDC-E1305, and the goal stays windowless.

Reserved and closed

• Record a claim-correlative position as duty with bearer and beneficiary. The claim_right view remains available as a query. prohibition is kept: the act’s vocabulary matches the form.
• recurring as a fourth goal form is reserved for 0.2 and the parser does not accept it.
• A power’s subject is the power’s subject matter, unrelated to prohibitions; a prohibition’s subject is action.

Neighbours and the selection rule

• prohibition vs constraint: a norm with addressee and window vs a bearerless finding. Someone and some time — prohibition.
• prohibition vs duty maintenance with an absence: the form already contains maintenance — a pair gives a double VIOLATED.
• prohibition vs then not action: a position with a cycle vs support f with no addressee. “Do not do by the deadline” — prohibition.
• prohibition vs liberty: conflict only over the same action for one subject with overlapping windows; priority decides, not modality.