uh-huh. That's what we do quite nicely ;)

And the whole process is one of negotiated confusion.

Certainly that happens, on occasion. But it doesn’t seem to be the rule, though. Consider that everyone posting on this thread has, for the most part, decided to call off the negotiations, avoid confusion, and use the accepted definitions of the words they chose to use, as found in dictionaries. I see no evidence that anyone has made up his or her own definition for a word and used it.


We understand I have to as a modal form of the verb expressing compulsion

Yes, we do. But we were discussing, ‘I’ve got to’ or ‘I have got to’, not simply ‘I have to’.