Transformation-Dominant Semantic Systems

Modern semantic systems can generate, translate, summarize, recombine, and propagate meaning at great speed while failing to preserve source, identity, authority, uncertainty, scope, or other commitments across those transformations. This paper proposes a morphology for diagnosing that asymmetry. Transformation and conservation should not be treated as mutually exclusive operation classes. A large semantic change can faithfully carry declared obligations; a nearly verbatim copy can sever provenance or authority. The revised model therefore uses two independent axes: semantic delta and obligation carriage. Conservation is a profile-relative property of a transformation, not simply a separate kind of operation. The paper defines a semantic-carriage envelope, typed preservation outcomes, transformation and carriage measures, failure patterns, and an empirical comparison program. It treats hallucination, semantic drift, and institutional incoherence as possible consequences of weak conservation among several competing explanations, not as established products of one architectural imbalance. It connects the diagnostic morphology to Constraint-Bearing Composability, Meta-Binding, Epistemic Lineage, Governance as Compilation, the Governed Meaning Base, and the universal GSM without merging their roles.