core/docs/decisions/ADR-0007-valence-layer.md

ADR-0007 — The Valence Layer

Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-05-12
Authors: AssetOverflow Architecture

---

Context

The field energy operator (ADR-0006) gives every point in the semantic field a scalar magnitude — how activated it is. But magnitude alone does not describe the full character of semantic force. Language carries directionality, emotional charge, rhetorical power, polarity, relational orientation, and emphasis — none of which collapse to a single scalar.

A divine creative command and a curse can have identical energy magnitudes. A declaration of love and a declaration of war can be equally hot. What distinguishes them is not how much force is in play but what kind of force, in which direction, and with what character.

This is valence. It is orthogonal to energy. Together — a scalar energy and a valence vector — they form a complete description of the semantic force at any field point.

The standard NLP approach (sentiment analysis: positive / negative / neutral, scored -1 to +1) is a catastrophic lossy projection of this multi-dimensional structure onto a single axis. It discards force type, relational orientation, emphasis, polarity kind, and all the precision that Hebrew and Greek morphology encodes. It is also not Third Door — it is the most widely-used, most overfit, most interpretively biased layer in the existing NLP stack. We do not use it.

---

Decision

We introduce the valence layer as a multi-channel vector attached to every field point and every CandidateGeometricPressure packet. Valence is not inferred by a downstream model — it is lifted directly from the morphological and syntactic structure of the source material by the language pack's lift rules.

The Five Valence Channels

Each channel is independent. They compose a ValenceBundle.

Channel 1: Affective Valence

The emotional character of the semantic content. This is not a sentiment score. It is a set of affect primitives drawn from the field point's source material:

affective: Set[AffinePrimitive]

AffinePrimitive ∈ {
  joy, grief, fear, love, anger, awe, longing,
  tenderness, fierce_loyalty, lament, exultation,
  dread, peace, yearning, righteous_indignation
}

Some of these coexist in the same lexical item — hesed (Hebrew: loving-kindness, covenant loyalty) carries both tenderness and fierce_loyalty simultaneously. The set encoding preserves this. A scalar score would force a choice between them and lose the tension that is the meaning.

Affective primitives are defined in packs/common/affect_primitives.jsonl. Each language pack's lift rules map lemmas and morphological features to primitives. English lift rules are coarser (lexical only). Hebrew and Greek lift rules are fine-grained (lemma + stem + context features).

Channel 2: Force Valence

The illocutionary and performative force of the semantic content — what kind of act the language is performing on the field:

force: ForceClass

ForceClass ∈ {
  declarative,       # states a fact
  performative,      # accomplishes what it declares (divine speech, vows, verdicts)
  imperative,        # commands
  cohortative,       # self-exhortation or invitation
  jussive,           # wish, permission, mild command
  interrogative,     # opens a field of possible answers
  optative,          # pure possibility, the softest force
  expressive,        # conveys emotional state without asserting fact
  commissive         # commits the speaker to a future action
}

This maps directly from Hebrew mood (imperative, cohortative, jussive) and Greek mood (indicative, subjunctive, optative, imperative) plus the pragmatic context of the utterance. The most important distinction here is performative — language that does not merely describe but enacts. Bara (Hebrew: divine creative act) is performative. John 1:1's en is declarative of a pre-existent state. The force class is what makes these computationally distinguishable.

Channel 3: Emphasis and Focus

What is foregrounded in the utterance — which element the source material is marking as the primary locus of semantic weight:

emphasis: EmphasisProfile

EmphasisProfile: {
  focus_element: str | None,   # the lemma or phrase being foregrounded
  mechanism: EmphasisMechanism,
  degree: EmphasisDegree
}

EmphasisMechanism ∈ {
  fronting,          # moved to clause-initial position (Hebrew, Greek)
  stress,            # prosodic emphasis (English)
  repetition,        # repeated for intensity
  particle,          # emphasis particle (Hebrew: aph, raq, gam; Greek: kai, ge, men)
  stem_intensification  # Hebrew piel / intensive stem
}

EmphasisDegree ∈ { unmarked, light, strong, absolute }

The Hebrew piel stem is stem_intensification — it doesn't just do the action, it does it intensively. Fronting a word in a Hebrew clause to the pre-verbal position is fronting / strong. Greek particle kai used with an adjective (kai autos: "even he himself") is particle / strong. These are instructions to the field: activate this region more than its neighbors.

Channel 4: Polarity

Not binary negation but polarity kind — the type of negation or opposition being applied:

polarity: PolaritySpec

PolaritySpec: {
  value: PolarityValue,
  kind: PolarityKind | None
}

PolarityValue ∈ { positive, negative, contrastive, privative }

PolarityKind ∈ {
  absolute,          # Hebrew lo — unconditional, permanent
  prohibitive,       # Hebrew al — do not (imperative context)
  conditional,       # Greek me — negation in subjunctive/conditional
  factual,           # Greek ou — negation of fact in indicative
  adversative        # strong contrast (Greek alla: "but rather")
}

The Hebrew distinction between lo and al is not a grammatical footnote — it is a semantic difference between a permanent state (absolute negation) and a situational prohibition (prohibitive negation). The Greek distinction between ou and me encodes whether the negation is a statement of fact or a conditional/volitional restraint. These distinctions are load-bearing for any system trying to reason accurately about what a text actually claims.

Channel 5: Relational Orientation

The directional vector of the semantic content — toward what or whom, in what spatial-relational posture:

orientation: OrientationSpec

OrientationSpec: {
  direction: OrientationDirection,
  target: str | None,           # lemma or field-anchor ID
  preposition_source: str | None  # the preposition that encodes this
}

OrientationDirection ∈ {
  toward,       # Greek pros + accusative — directional presence-toward
  within,       # Greek en — locative, interior
  from,         # Greek ek/apo — source, origin
  through,      # Greek dia — instrumental, mediating
  under,        # Greek hypo — agency below, subjection
  upon,         # Greek epi — over, bearing upon
  alongside,    # Greek para — beside, accompanying
  against,      # adversative orientation
  for,          # benefactive
  reflexive     # self-oriented, middle voice signature
}

Greek pros ton theon (John 1:1) is toward / target: god.being.divine — the Logos is not merely with God but oriented toward God, facing God, in active relational presence. This is not the same as en (within) or para (alongside). John chose pros with precision. The valence layer preserves that precision in the field.

---

The ValenceBundle in CandidateGeometricPressure

The payload_json of every CandidateGeometricPressure packet now carries an optional valence field:

{
  "field_target": "logos.articulation.creative",
  "energy_class_hint": "E3",
  "valence": {
    "affective": ["awe", "life_giving"],
    "force": "performative",
    "emphasis": {
      "focus_element": "logos",
      "mechanism": "fronting",
      "degree": "strong"
    },
    "polarity": {
      "value": "positive",
      "kind": null
    },
    "orientation": {
      "direction": "toward",
      "target": "anchor:existence-being-copular",
      "preposition_source": "pros"
    }
  }
}

The ValenceBundle is:

• Proposed at lift time by the language pack's lift rules
• Validated at the SemanticGate in the IngestCompiler (structural completeness only — the gate does not re-interpret the valence)
• Propagated with the packet through the governance chain
• Written into the field alongside the versor update and the energy class assignment
• Available to the readback layer for surface generation guidance

---

How Valence Drives Articulation

When the readback layer generates surface language from a field region, it receives both the energy class (from ADR-0006) and the valence bundle. The surface form is shaped by both:

• force: performative → the system does not hedge. It does not write "it seems that" or "one could argue". It declares.
• force: optative → the system softens. It writes in the register of possibility and wish.
• affective: [grief, longing] → the syntax slows. Shorter clauses. Heavier pauses.
• emphasis.degree: absolute → the foregrounded element comes first, receives stress, is not buried.
• polarity.kind: absolute → the negation is stated without qualification. Lo means no, permanently.
• orientation.direction: toward → the relational framing is directional and active, not static.

This is not template-filling. It is the field telling the surface layer what kind of speech-act is being performed and what emotional and relational character it carries. The surface layer's job is to honor that character in whatever language it is generating.

---

Valence Tension as Signal

Two packets with the same semantic_key but opposing valence channels are not convergent evidence — they are tension. The field holds both. The tension itself is tracked:

• Same target, force: declarative from one source and force: interrogative from another → the field knows this region is contested between assertion and question
• Same target, polarity: positive from one source and polarity: negative from another → genuine contradiction OR paradox
• Same target, affective: [joy] from one source and affective: [grief] from another → the classical Hebrew lament-that-trusts, present throughout the Psalms

The distinction between contradiction (to be corrected) and paradox (to be held) is not automatically resolvable. Valence tension at E4 (critical energy) escalates to ARCHITECT_REVIEW_REQUIRED. Valence tension at E0–E1 is a resting paradox — a known tension that has settled into stable coexistence.

---

Consequences

Positive

• The system can distinguish a command from a wish from a declaration from a performative act — not by inference but by direct morphological evidence from the source
• Articulation is guided by the actual character of the meaning, producing surface language with appropriate register, force, and emotional honesty
• Hebrew and Greek morphology (binyanim, moods, particles, prepositions) becomes directly load-bearing — every morphological distinction is a valence signal
• Paradox and contradiction are first-class field states, not errors to be resolved away
• The logos is not just a stored meaning — it is a meaning with force, direction, and character, ready to be spoken as it actually is

Costs and constraints

• Lift rules for Hebrew and Greek become significantly richer — every valence channel requires pack-specific mapping logic. This is correct complexity (it reflects the actual structure of the languages) but it is not trivial work
• The English lift rules are necessarily coarser — English encodes much of this information lexically rather than morphologically, so the valence signals are less reliable. This is honest and should be documented in packs/en/manifest.json
• Valence tension tracking requires the field to maintain a tension index alongside the convergence index. This is bounded in size (only high-convergence regions generate tension) but must be designed explicitly

Rejected alternatives

• Sentiment analysis: See Context. Rejected on grounds of Semantic Rigor and Third Door.
• Emotion classifiers: Same rejection. A classifier produces an inferred label. We want a lifted fact from the source morphology.
• Pragma-linguistic tagging by LLM: Nondeterministic, D3 by definition, cannot be AUTO_ACCEPT_ELIGIBLE. The entire point of lift rules is to produce D0/D1 valence assignments from deterministic morphological evidence.

---

References

• ADR-0006: Field energy operator — the orthogonal scalar companion
• ADR-0005: Language pack contract — lift and readback rule interfaces
• packs/he/morphology.jsonl — Hebrew stem, mood, aspect source
• packs/el/morphology.jsonl — Greek mood, voice, aspect source
• packs/common/ — affect primitives, anchor definitions
• Session notes: 2026-05-12-b (valence, wave conjugation, logos as speech-act)