The Prepositional Alienation founds liberation philology through a close study of the English preposition for.
Its central claim is that English can express structural function without conscious intent, but cannot securely anchor that reading. The purposive reading—what someone meant or wanted—remains grammatically dominant. Functional diagnosis therefore enters English as a guest inside the house of intention.
The essay names the resulting burden the circumlocution tax. “She did it for power” is compact because it attributes motive. A structural account—what a process reproduces regardless of anyone’s intention—requires longer, defensive wording. Grammar rewards psychological accusation and taxes systemic analysis.
A four-stage genealogy traces the fusion: Old English distributed cause, substitution, purpose, and instrument across distinct constructions; Norman French administrative translation expanded for under the pressure of pur; Latin ad and pro collapsed into one English preposition; and Enlightenment suspicion of final causes hardened non-intentional function into a disfavored reading.
Cross-linguistic comparisons with Greek, Latin, and German show that function and intent can be distinguished more directly. The essay then follows the grammatical problem into platform capitalism: character limits make the circumlocution tax expensive, ranking systems reward emotionally charged motive claims, moderation becomes intent jurisprudence, and AI summaries reproduce the default.
Liberation philology joins historical linguistics, political economy of language, linguistic relativity, deconstruction, decolonial linguistics, and the Semantic Economy. Its object is the grammar through which structural claims must pass—and the histories of power sedimented in that grammar.