We address the way verb-based and rule-content knowledge are combined in
understanding institutional deontics. Study 1 showed that the institutional
regulations used in our studies were readily categorised into one of two content
groups: rights or duties. Participants perceived rights as benefiting the
addressees identified by the rule, whereas they perceived duties as benefiting
the collective that imposed the rule. Studies 2, 3, and 4 showed that rule
content (rights vs. duties) had clear effects on perceptions of violations and
relevance of cases for explaining the rule, even when controlling for deontic
verb, phrasing of the action permitted by a right, or the formality of the deontic
verb. These effects are incompatible with a simple pragmatic disambiguation
approach to pragmatic modulation, as they often induce permissibility
judgments that contradict the core semantic meanings of the deontic verbs.
Other ways of reconciling verb meaning with rule content should be considered
in a fuller theory of the interpretation of institutional rules.