The Syntax of Non-Agency: Institutional Language and the Erasure of Responsibility

This paper explores the syntactic strategies used in institutional language to obscure agency and dissolve accountability. Focusing on passive constructions, nominalizations, and algorithmic phrasing, it argues that contemporary bureaucratic and automated systems increasingly rely on grammars of depersonalization to legitimize power without exposing its source. Drawing from critical discourse analysis, performative theory, and emerging work on syntactic sovereignty, the study demonstrates how grammar functions not merely as form, but as a mechanism of control.