Chapter 5 Predicate Coverage and Deontic Force

This appendix reports the deontic force classification and predicate vocabulary analysis for the SDA Design Standard (2019) figures channel as evaluated in Chapter 5. Deontic force — the classification of a normative statement as obligatory, permissive, or prohibitive — is a foundational property for any compliance verification system. A requirement whose deontic force cannot be determined is effectively unenforceable. The analysis covers the full 406-entry serialised figures corpus and reports deontic distribution by field type, by SDA design category, and across the extracted predicate vocabulary. Source data: deontic-force-figures.json and figures-triples-statistics.json (run_id 2603241227), archived at publish-thesis/publish-data/appendix-data/ch5-artefact-bundle/data-package/canonical/.

Corpus-Level Deontic Distribution

Of the 406 entries in the serialised figures corpus, 205 (50.5%) carry modal content and 201 (49.5%) are non-modal. The non-modal entries comprise context descriptions (67 entries), applicability markers (107 entries), and non-modal notes (27 entries) — all of which serve framing, scoping, or informational functions rather than prescriptive ones. The near-even split between modal and non-modal content reflects the structural composition of the serialised corpus, which captures design requirements alongside their surrounding contextual metadata.

Table A5-DF.1: Corpus-level deontic force distribution

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Source: deontic-force-figures.json, summary.force_distribution (run_id 2603241227).

Within the modal entries, the overwhelming majority are obligatory: 189 of 205 modal entries (92.2%) carry obligatory force. Permissive entries (13, or 6.3%) and prohibitive entries (3, or 1.5%) together account for less than 8% of modal content. This distribution confirms that the SDA Design Standard’s figure channel is predominantly prescriptive rather than permissive. In summary, the corpus-level deontic profile establishes a near-unipolar obligation structure that has direct consequences for the implementation logic of automated verification systems. The next section examines the specific modal terms through which this obligatory force is expressed.

Modal Term Inventory

The 205 modal entries employ six distinct modal markers. The following table shows the full inventory with occurrence counts and force class assignments.

Table A5-DF.2: Modal term inventory

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Source: deontic-force-figures.json, summary.modal_term_inventory (run_id 2603241227). Total exceeds 205 because some entries contain multiple modal terms.

The marker “shall” dominates with 200 occurrences, accounting for 92.6% of all modal term instances. This monosyllabic indicator is the cornerstone of Australian standards drafting practice, where “shall” signals mandatory compliance per the conventions of Standards Australia and ISO directive usage. Its near-exclusive use in the SDA figure channel simplifies automated deontic classification: a pattern-matching approach that identifies “shall” captures the vast majority of obligatory content. Zero entries were flagged as deontic-ambiguous, confirming that the standard’s modal vocabulary is sufficiently disciplined to support deterministic force classification. Building on this modal term inventory, the next section disaggregates deontic force by field type to reveal the structurally significant finding that all design requirement entries are 100% modal.

Deontic Force by Field Type

The cross-tabulation of deontic force against field type reveals a structurally significant finding: design requirements are 100% modal, while context and applicability entries are 100% non-modal by construction.

Table A5-DF.3: Deontic force by field type

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Source: deontic-force-figures.json, force_by_field_type (run_id 2603241227).

Every one of the 189 design requirement entries carries explicit deontic force — there are no design requirements with ambiguous or absent modal marking. Within the Design requirement field type, 181 entries (95.8%) are obligatory, 7 (3.7%) are permissive, and 1 (0.5%) is prohibitive. The single prohibitive design requirement is ID 235, Figure 10: “Use of shower screens is not permitted.”

Notes present an intermediate profile: 16 of 43 (37.2%) carry modal content. The 8 obligatory notes represent requirements that a text-only parser might overlook if it treats “Note” fields as non-normative. These 8 entries embed prescriptive content in a conventionally informational field type, representing a subtle standards drafting pattern that the serialisation schema correctly captures. Overall, the field-type disaggregation confirms that deontic force is not uniformly distributed and that field-type-aware processing is necessary for complete normative capture. The next section presents the category-level analysis that reveals how this obligatory force concentrates differentially across the four SDA design categories.

Deontic Force by SDA Category

Because a single entry may apply to multiple categories, the disaggregation by SDA design category does not produce exclusive counts. The following table reports obligatory and permissive counts per category.

Table A5-DF.4: Obligatory and permissive entries by SDA category

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Source: deontic-force-figures.json, force_by_category (run_id 2603241227). Prohibitive entries are not disaggregated by category in the source data.

The category-level distribution reveals a substantial asymmetry: the Fully Accessible (135 obligatory) and High Physical Support (138 obligatory) categories carry more than three times the obligatory requirement count of Improved Liveability (41) and Robust (38). This differential reflects the SDA framework’s design intent: higher-support categories impose more prescriptive spatial requirements. The near-parity between Fully Accessible (135) and High Physical Support (138) obligatory counts, and between Improved Liveability (41) and Robust (38), further confirms the two-tier pattern observed in Appendix: Polysemy Metrics and Confidence: the four SDA categories effectively operate as two paired tiers at the level of deontic structure. Taken together, the corpus-level, field-type, and category-level disaggregations present a consistent picture of how deontic force is distributed through the standard, and thus establish the informational basis that the predicate vocabulary analysis in the next section extends to the level of specific prescriptive verbs.

Predicate Vocabulary

The 189 design requirement triples employ 17 unique predicate phrases, indicating a controlled but not minimal predicate vocabulary. The following table presents the distribution of the 10 most frequent predicates.

Table A5-DF.5: Predicate vocabulary distribution (top 10 of 17)

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Source: figures-triples-statistics.json, verb_vocabulary.distribution (generated 2026-03-24 11:49).

The top five predicates account for 164 of 189 triples (86.8%), confirming that the SDA figure channel uses a narrow set of prescriptive verbs. The dominance of “shall be” (67 occurrences, 35.4%) and “shall be provided” (41 occurrences, 21.7%) reflects the standard’s focus on spatial provision requirements. The locative predicate “shall be located” (23, 12.2%) captures positioning requirements, while “shall have” (17, 10.0%) captures property assignments. The controlled predicate vocabulary has a direct practical consequence: the 17-predicate inventory is small enough that a compliance verification system can define an explicit handler for each predicate type rather than relying on generalised semantic parsing. Overall, the predicate vocabulary confirms that the SDA figure channel encodes a structurally narrow but semantically dense set of spatial obligations that the serialisation schema can represent with high completeness.

Implications for Compliance Verification

The 100% modal rate for design requirements means that every spatial requirement extracted from the SDA figures can be assigned a definitive deontic classification, eliminating one of the most common sources of standards interpretation disputes. The concentration of obligatory force (“shall” accounting for 92.6% of all modal markers) further simplifies the compliance logic. A verification system can adopt a default-obligatory posture and flag only the small minority of permissive (13) and prohibitive (3) entries for differential treatment.

The zero deontic ambiguity count confirms that no manual adjudication is required for force classification in this corpus, supporting the feasibility of fully automated deontic tagging in the serialisation pipeline. Combined with the 100% identity resolution rate reported in Appendix: Chapter 5 Figures-Channel Ambiguity Analysis, these results establish that both the what (entity identity) and the how strongly (deontic force) of every design requirement can be determined without human intervention. Therefore, the deontic and predicate evidence presented in this appendix supports the Chapter 5 evaluation claim that the serialisation schema provides a complete and deterministic normative representation of the SDA Design Standard’s figures channel.