Building a Domain Invariant Philology Part I: Finding Semantic Operators

Across music, narrative, and computation, structurally similar patterns recur despite radically different substrates. This paper proposes that these commonalities arise, not from intrinsic properties of state to the (cross-)domains, but from shared operators on structured state spaces. It introduces two primitive operators, Recursion (R) and Resolution (C), together with one structural observable, Tension (T ), and uses cross-domain examples to show a substrate independent structural invariance result: a “semantic eigenform” x0 that functions as a stable fixed kernel that persists across recursive elaboration and resolution.