A Structural Grammar for Bounded Recursion: Signal, Collapse, Containment, and Proportional Delay

This preprint introduces a minimal structural grammar for understanding instability and recovery in feedback-driven systems. The grammar describes a common sequence observed across domains—signal admission, recursive amplification, collapse, containment, proportional delay, and stillness—without committing to domain-specific mechanisms or ontological claims. A central contribution is the identification of proportional delay as a generic stabilising principle: a means of restoring bounded behaviour by moderating update rates rather than altering internal structure or content. The framework is intended as a foundational, domain-agnostic vocabulary for analysing recursive processes in cognitive, artificial, physical, and social systems. Mathematical instantiations, empirical applications, and domain-specific implementations are deliberately left to future work.