Obligationsthat

Obligationsthat is a term used in some analytic discussions of contract law and normative linguistics to describe a class of deontic statements in which the duty is defined by a that-clause. The term emphasizes the grammatical device that encodes the content of the duty, namely the clause introduced by that.

As a neologism, obligationsthat does not have a standardized definition across disciplines. In law, it may refer to obligations whose exact scope is specified by a that-clause in the governing text, such as a lease or insurance policy. In linguistics and philosophy, it is used to analyze how the content of “that”-clauses articulates what must be done, distinguishing these from more general or abstract duties.

Definition and usage: An obligationsthat statement asserts that an actor bears a duty to perform a particular action or satisfy a condition, where the action or condition is described in a that-clause. For example: The contract imposes an obligation that the goods meet quality standards; the insurer imposes an obligation that the claimant provide proof of loss. The emphasis is on how the clause content determines the obligation’s scope.

Applications: The concept helps in contract drafting, compliance auditing, and natural language processing, where extracting and clarifying duties depends on parsing that-clauses. It also informs deontic logic studies that model how obligations are activated by specific propositions.

See also: deontic logic, contract law, normative linguistics, legal drafting.