Speculative institutional grammars: rethinking the limits of participatory AI

Participatory AI governance assumes that deliberation among diverse stakeholders can shape regulatory design. In practice, deliberative input affects governance only when it can be articulated as an institutional rule. This article examines the linguistic conditions under which normative claims acquire this form. Drawing on Crawford and Ostrom’s ADICO framework, Institutional Grammar is often treated as a neutral analytic tool, but it effectively defines the syntactic structure through which obligations become institutionally legible. Within this framework, a rule attributes responsibility to a defined actor (Attribute), encodes a deontic operator (must, may, must not), specifies an action (Aim), and defines the conditions under which the action applies (Condition), potentially accompanied