A second insight arrived from an unexpected direction: a Taiji master’s teaching.
The claim was: “Someone who is not physically flexible is not mentally flexible either.” Grammatically declarative. Semantically assertoric in appearance. But uttered in a pedagogical context, as an exhortation — not as a claim about the world.
This exposed a gap in the framework. Before classifying a claim into any D1 category, one must verify that the utterance is actually being used as an assertion. Austin’s lesson from How to Do Things with Words (1962): the same surface form can carry assertive, directive, expressive, or performative illocutionary force. The framework operates on propositions; if the utterance is not asserting something, ontological classification is categorically wrong.
The solution was Pre-Step 0: a mandatory check, taking roughly thirty seconds, applied before any D1 classification. Three markers suspend validation and trigger the NA_ILLOCUTORIO code:
- Explicit imperative mood
- Explicit performative (“I now pronounce you…”)
- Direct interrogative
Declarative form with ambiguous force → treat as assertion. The framework does not recover contexts not provided by the speaker.
Pre-Step 0 was integrated into Taxonomy v2.2 and Coding Manual v2.0.
Documents: tassonomia_completa_v2_2.docx (v2.2 notes), Coding_Manual_v2_0.docx (Section 5.2)