The gift is the native language of love: an expressive act whose meaning is constituted by the relation it enacts. Economics possesses a rich literature on gift-giving — altruism in the family, gift exchange in labor markets, gifts as costly signals, the deadweight loss of in-kind transfer, and the crowding-out of intrinsic motivation — yet each of these theories, I argue, shares a common move: the gift is made tractable by interpreting it into a transfer language whose semantics is a ledger. This paper makes that move itself the object of analysis. A semiotic and psychoanalytic layer first explains the gift's surplus over the thing: following Saussure and Baudrillard, the gift is a signifier whose value is positional — generated by its place in a differential system that is the relation's own history — and following Lacan, what it signifies is desire rather than need, so that its functional excess (the economist's "deadweight loss") is the mechanism of its signifying work, not waste. Using elementary tools from formal language theory, I then model the expressive practice of intimate giving as a context-sensitive language whose semantics depends on relational history, and the economic-institutional reading as a non-injective, context-forgetting interpretation map into a finite-state ledger language. Alienation is then given a precise structural characterization: it is the contraction of generative practice onto the preimage of the ledger language — agents come to produce only what the interpretation can see. Two further harms follow: epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007), since contributions outside the map's range are illegible as contributions; and distributive misdescription, since ledger balance is the wrong functional for value that circulates generatively. Building on Eglash's generative justice and a relational ontology of the gift, I propose recirculation depth, rather than bilateral balance, as the appropriate justice functional, and draw implications for the evidence-informed use of intimate-relationship data.
Wanhong HUANG (Sat,) studied this question.