Concept Anchoring: From Human Sentences to Bound Project Work

We present Concept Anchoring, the genesis layer of the Ontological Space Protocol (OSP), which turns a human sentence into bound, accepted, measured project work only through a type- and protocol-enforced binding chain: candidate isolation, operator acceptance, predicate lowering, cross-family translation, operator binding, and capability-gated task genesis. Each transition is a gate with a named invariant, enforced at the type boundary, the constructor boundary, or the regression-test boundary. We verify 16 core binding-chain invariants — thirteen type-enforced and three runtime-asserted. Two parallel invariant families — Evidence-Identity (EI1–EI8) and Derived-Projection (RP1–RP4) — constrain distinct epistemic layers the chain depends on but does not subsume. The evidence includes structural type and constructor boundaries, transition tests, and 30 cumulative workspace compile-fail tests (28 Paper-3-specific, 2 exercising Paper 2's inherited INV-T2 boundary). Across 13 golden fixtures and 5 held-out adversarial sentences, we report a five-state conformance: 12 conform, 2 partial, 2 known limitation, 2 reject-as-expected, 0 unexpected failure. This is a verification paper, not a semantic-extraction benchmark. The deterministic keyword matcher that drives translation is a placeholder for concept-synthesis work. The matcher is not the contribution; the binding protocol is.