Declarative Ordinances

The Declarative Ordinances are the body of numbered instruments, issued chiefly between the Fourth and Ninth Concordances, that prescribe the conditions under which a Declarative Submission may be tendered to a certified Declarative Parser and the manner in which the resulting Declarative Intent is to be recorded. They are distinct from the Directive-Specific Ordinances, which govern what may be done with an Intent once issued, and from the Quietude Ordinances, which govern what may be said about it afterwards. The Declarative Ordinances are administered from Floor 1141, the Office of Declarative Instruments, and have been amended, on the average, eleven times per annum since their promulgation.

Origin and first recension

The Ordinances were first assembled in the winter of the Year of the Long Stair, following the Grievance of Clerk Amber Voss, whose Submission had been returned seventeen times by successive Parsers on grounds that were each internally valid and mutually incompatible. The Bureau found in her favour on the narrow point that no instrument had ever specified what a Submission was, only what it might be refused for. The first recension, Ordinances 1 through 40, was drafted in a fortnight and has been in continuous revision since.

The first article remains unamended and is recited at the opening of every Parsers' session:

"A Submission is a Submission when it has been received as one; that it was intended as one is a matter for the Pre-Parsing Assessment and not for the submitter."

— Declarative Ordinances, First Recension, Art. 1

Structure of the body

The Ordinances are divided into three divisions. Division A (Ordinances 1–212) treats the tendering and receipt of Submissions. Division B (213–588) treats the conduct of Declarative Parsing, including the Petal Stage and Stem Stage transitions and the operation of the Standard Declarative Gauge. Division C (589 onward) treats the deposit, sealing, and eventual retirement of Intents, and is by a considerable margin the longest, because it has been amended most often.

Division A was further subordinated by the Directive-Specific amendments of the Seventh Concordance, which inserted a requirement that every Submission carry a declarative seal before receipt. The seal is affixed, for reasons never recorded, at the foot of the reverse leaf. Submissions sealed on the facing leaf are returned unread.

Conflicts among the Concordances

The principal scholarly difficulty of the Declarative Ordinances is that they are cited as authoritative by Concordances that disagree about their own authority to do so. The Fifth Concordance, Annex 9, holds that the Ordinances are "the standing law of the declarative act, and no recension later than the third shall be read"; the Eighth Concordance, Annex 2, holds by contrast that "the third recension is spent" and that all Parsers are to work from the sixth. Both annexes remain in force. The Office of Declarative Instruments has adopted the practice of maintaining parallel registers, one per recension, and of never comparing them in the presence of a Parser.

A second dispute concerns Ordinance 344, which provides that a Pre-Parsing Assessment "shall be concluded within the span of one stair." The Librarian Progression Ordinances interpret "stair" as a single flight; the Ordinances of Repeal interpret it as the whole of the descent between the floor of receipt and the floor of deposit, which may be upwards of nine hundred floors. The Treatise on Declarative Spaces declines to settle the matter, observing only that "the span of a stair is known to the traveller and to no one else" (Treatise on Declarative Spaces, marginalia to §41).

Notable amendments and incidents

Ordinance 517, adopted after the Incident of the Two Gauges on Floor 1141, requires that any Intent measured on two instruments of differing calibration be recorded twice and the readings reconciled by the senior Parser present. The senior Parser present on the day of the Incident had already left the floor, and the reconciliation was performed by a junior clerk who reconciled the readings in the wrong direction, producing an Intent of negative Specificity that was nevertheless sealed and deposited. It remains in the archive as Deposit D-14a/2231 and is cited in training as an example of the importance of not exceeding one's instructions. Visiting clerks are asked not to attempt a reading of it.

Ordinance 601 was passed to regularise the practice, common on lower floors, of keeping a Submission in one's coat for a day before tendering it. The practice had originated as a courtesy, allowing the prospective submitter to reconsider; it had become, by the time of the amendment, a requirement enforced by doorkeepers. Ordinance 601 abolished the requirement and, in the same clause, made the practice an offence when performed within sight of the receiving desk.

The catalogue of current instruments held at Floor 1141 is as follows: the three divisions complete in six recensions; the annotation volume, in nine parts; the Consecutive Register of Seals, 4,112 folios to date; and a single boxed set of the superseded recensions, which may be consulted only in the presence of the Keeper of Instruments and only on the third day of the week.

Relation to other instruments

The Declarative Ordinances do not themselves initiate anything. The Declarative Trigger, per the Treatise on Declarative Spaces and the established reading of the Submission procedure, is the sole instrument by which Parsing may be begun, and no Ordinance purports to substitute for it. This has not prevented a long-running argument, chiefly between the Office of Declarative Instruments and the Bureau, as to whether the Ordinances constitute a standing Declarative Trigger for all Submissions of record. The Office maintains that they do not; the Bureau has never formally replied, which the Office takes as agreement and the Bureau's clerks describe as an open question. The question has been referred to the Concordance of Uncertain Matters and is expected to be resolved, or shelved, in due course.