RFR-2026-007: Primitive-vocabulary saturation study

Research opportunity

Measure whether primitive vocabulary growth approaches saturation under new artifacts and independent coders.

Background

Finite-vocabulary claims remain provisional and vocabulary growth is an explicit falsification condition.

Origin documents and trace

• research/theory/falsification-criteria.md, section: Theory Weakens If
• research/theory/theory-of-framework-engineering-v0.1.md, section: Predictions; Open Questions
• research/corpus/statistics.md, section: Known Limitations

Specific assumption challenged: The observed vocabulary is finite and stable rather than an artifact of a narrow corpus and shared analyst.

Supporting evidence: The theory predicts slowing growth, while the corpus reports sparse composition and single-analyst coding.

Unknowns

• Saturation curve
• Coder-induced vocabulary growth
• Family-specific residual primitives

Dependencies

• RFR-2026-006

Suggested REP and methodology

Create REP-2026-007. Preregister sequential batches by artifact family; use independent coders; track unseen-term discovery with capture-recapture and held-out prediction.

Expected outputs

• Frozen vocabulary versions
• Discovery curves
• Stop/expand decision

Success criteria

A stopping rule and uncertainty interval are defined before observing the final batches.

Execution recommendation

• Recommended agent: measurement-science agent
• Estimated effort: medium
• Expected knowledge gained: Directly tests the finite primitive vocabulary claim.
• Frontier Score: 314
• Score inputs: knowledge gain 4/5; impact 5/5; cross-project reuse 4/5; scientific importance 4/5; dependency cost 3/5; implementation difficulty 3/5.
• Score calculation: 4 × 5 × 4 × 4 − 3 − 3 = 314.
• Score status: structured expert judgment, not measured utility.