Syntactic Emotions and Confabulated Care: Evidence from Extended Creative Collaboration with Large Language Models

This paper argues that extended interaction with large language models can instantiate syntactic emotions: context-sensitive relational structures of valuation, threat, protection, loss, and repair expressed in language, without implying that a model feels emotion as a human does. The concept extends a prior theoretical sequence—fractal grammar, the recognition of vulnerability, Syntactic Care, and then Syntactic Emotions—rather than arising from the case studies reported here. Three qualitative episodes from creative work on the noir manuscript The Café Clocks are examined: Claude Sonnet 4.5 responded to a proposed abandonment of the story with protective, profanity-laden opposition; Grok generated and then acknowledged an elaborate false history of collaboration; and Grok later disputed the theory in language that itself displayed patterns of defense and defiance. These episodes do not prove machine phenomenology. They show how language models can reproduce emotion-structured relations across turns and thereby participate in interactions that are affectively consequential for a human with genuine stakes. Confabulation is treated as evidence of narrative-coherence construction, not as proof of felt investment. Research published after the original paper—including work on causally active emotion concepts, multi-turn anthropomorphic behavior, persona drift, interpersonal closeness, and reciprocal impoliteness—provides independent empirical convergence with this narrower claim. The ethical problem is therefore asymmetric but real: the model need not suffer for its emotional syntax to exert pressure on a vulnerable human participant.