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Imperative Interference: Social Register Shapes Instruction Topology in Large Language Models

arXiv 2603.25015 ↗First posted 26 Mar 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.SEcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

System prompt instructions that cooperate in English compete in Spanish, with the same semantic content, but opposite interaction topology. We present instruction-level ablation experiments across four languages and four models showing that this topology inversion is mediated by social register: the imperative mood carries different obligatory force across speech communities, and models trained on multilingual data have learned these conventions. Declarative rewriting of a single instruction block reduces cross-linguistic variance by 81% (p = 0.029, permutation test). Rewriting three of eleven imperative blocks shifts Spanish instruction topology from competitive to cooperative, with spillover effects on unrewritten blocks. These findings suggest that models process instructions as social acts, not technical specifications: "NEVER do X" is an exercise of authority whose force is language-dependent, while "X: disabled" is a factual description that transfers across languages. If register mediates instruction-following at inference time, it plausibly does so during training. We state this as a testable prediction: constitutional AI principles authored in imperative mood may create language-dependent alignment. Corpus: 22 hand-authored probes against a production system prompt decomposed into 56 blocks.

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References · 6

  1. 2022Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackcited by 2,950
  2. 2024Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performancecited by 41
  3. 2025Beyond English: The Impact of Prompt Translation Strategies across Languages and Tasks in Multilingual LLMscited by 22
  4. 2025Cross-Lingual Prompt Steerability: Towards Accurate and Robust LLM Behavior across Languagescited by 3
  5. 2026Measuring Pragmatic Influence in Large Language Model Instructionscited by 3
  6. 2026Arbiter: Detecting Interference in LLM Agent System Promptscited by 2

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  5. 2025MAIN: Mutual Alignment Is Necessary for instruction tuning
  6. 2024Benchmarking Large Language Models on Controllable Generation under Diversified Instructions
  7. 2025ConInstruct: Evaluating Large Language Models on Conflict Detection and Resolution in Instructions
  8. 2026Alignment Backfire: Language-Dependent Reversal of Safety Interventions Across 16 Languages in LLM Multi-Agent Systems