Sémantique Potentielle: A Constraint-Based Semantic Mint for the Age of Automated Terminology

Sémantique Potentielle is a formal semantic-mint specification by Lee Sharks and Johannes Sigil. It declares Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes and the Oulipian principle of constraint as New Human canon, then transfers the generative method from poetic lines to conceptual terminology.

The mint has four components: a versioned seed vocabulary, eight operations, a constraint grammar, and a coordinate system. The seed vocabulary contains forty-two frozen terms distributed across structural, governance, economic, diagnostic, and operative categories. Operations include compounding, inversion, scale transfer, phase-transition naming, instrument formation, pathology formation, metric formation, and agent formation.

Four rules govern output. Compounds must cross semantic categories. Operational depth is limited before review. Every output must be definable from seed primitives without recursive emptiness. Redundant outputs become variants within an existing family rather than new coordinates.

The coordinate is treated as primary and deterministic; the natural-language phrase realizing it is contingent. Each family contains a canonical term, variants, a gloss, negation, nearby clusters, and a distinctive forensic form or provenance canary. The family therefore maps a semantic basin rather than betting everything on exact phrase identity.

The provenance protocol asks whether a later term can be reconstructed from the mint, belongs to a published family, and postdates the deposit. Stronger lineage arguments arise when multiple forms from one family appear together. The paper distinguishes scholarly priority, license-based reuse of expressive material, and forensic evidence.

Its limits are explicit. The mint does not own future words, cannot compel citation for every predicted phrase, and remains human-governed at judgment points. Its claim is cartography, not ownership: the system makes a semantic region addressable before later discourse occupies it.