Recoverability Regimes in Grammar: Metric, Ordinal, and Structural Encoding as Non-Nested Systems of Linguistic Discretization

Recoverability Regimes in Grammar develops a new theory of grammatical encoding as bidirectional discretization. It argues that metric, ordinal, and structural expressions are non-nested systems: each preserves one class of invariants while collapsing others. The book formalizes this claim through distortion functions, rate-constrained optimization, non-subset theorems, and hybrid encoder geometry, then turns the theory into an empirical program through corpus annotation, typological prediction, participant tasks, computational modeling, and falsification criteria. At the intersection of formal semantics, linguistic typology, cognitive science, and information theory, this book offers a new answer to an old problem: grammar is not merely a system for saying more or less. It is a system for deciding what must remain recoverable.