Agency

What agency is

Agency is the grammatical subject discipline on every Vaquum surface. The single value the parameter takes is abstract — the phenomenon, mechanism, or observed entity occupies the subject position; the firm and the observer recede; mechanisms are named directly. First-person singular is forbidden in body prose, anthropomorphism of markets and systems is forbidden, and proper-noun and pronoun subjects stay below 20 percent of the sentences across a passage.

One value, abstract

The parameter takes exactly one value across the system, and the typed module rejects any other string at parse time. The fixed value carries an invariance: abstract agency applies to every surface, and the validator runs the same closed rule set against each source file. Mechanism as subject is preferred over observer as subject, the firm is preferred over we for institutional claims, and the data show is preferred over we see. The constant maxProperNounPronounSubjectShare declares the 20 percent ceiling reserved for the grammatical-subject parse rule.

Sub-properties

Agency declares 12 sub-properties in its typed source. The subject axis carries grammatical-subject, mechanism-as-subject, attribution-to-data, and agent-promotion — every sentence is read against the entity sitting in the subject position. The pronoun axis carries first-person-plural, first-person-singular, and second-person — each names a pronoun the parameter restricts or forbids. The named-actor axis carries proper-noun-agency, team-names, and institutional-voice — each names a named actor whose presence the parameter constrains. The construction axis carries passive-voice and anthropomorphism — each is a sentence-level construction the parameter inspects.

Of the 12 sub-properties, 5 are backed by typed rules in the validator. Anthropomorphism and first-person-singular emit fail. Team-names and first-person-plural emit flag. Second-person also emits flag at the typed-regex layer; the typed regex cannot tell body context from a button label, so the rule downgrades from the parse-with-context fail the addendum specifies.

The remaining 7 sub-properties await typed rules. One is the grammatical-subject parse rule with its 20 percent ceiling. The other 6 are editorial-review sub-properties. Three sit on the subject axis: mechanism-as-subject, attribution-to-data, and agent-promotion. Two sit on the named-actor axis: proper-noun-agency and institutional-voice. One sits on the construction axis: passive-voice.

Agency visualised

The first exhibit below renders the rule itself — the parse rule’s permitted band along a shared axis, with a hatched failure region beyond the band’s edge. The axis is the non-phenomenon subject share across a passage; the abstract bracket runs from zero to 20 percent and the failure region runs above. The 20 percent ceiling is read directly from maxProperNounPronounSubjectShare in @vaquum/voice/parameters/agency, so the diagram and the rule cannot disagree. The hatched region carries the diagram’s claim — the share the validator rejects when the parse rule is typed.

Typed rules

The second exhibit below renders the typed rules read directly from @vaquum/voice/parameters/agency. Each row carries the sub-property the rule guards, the rule’s prose description, the mechanism the validator uses, and the declared severity. The single-rule-per-row layout matches the reference-table form already used on the preceding voice pages.

Mechanisms

Agency carries two mechanisms in its typed rule set, drawn from the closed set of four — regex, dictionary, parse, and editorial — declared at the validator level. Three rules run as regex matches over body prose, guarding first-person-singular, second-person pronouns, and the we ran / we saw / we think active-description pattern. Two rules load dictionaries — anthropomorphism phrases and team-name phrases. No agency rule runs as parse or editorial yet; the parse mechanism is reserved for the grammatical-subject distribution and the contextual second-person check, and the editorial mechanism is reserved for sub-properties whose check the validator cannot decide alone.