We introduce a set of combinatorial techniques for studying the simplicial
bounded cohomology of semi-simplicial sets, simplicial complexes and posets. We
apply these methods to prove several new bounded acyclicity results for
semi-simplicial sets appearing in the homological stability literature. Our
strategy is to recast classical arguments (due to Bestvina, Maazen, van der
Kallen, Vogtmann, Charney and, recently, Galatius--Randal-Williams) in the
setting of bounded cohomology using uniformly bounded refinements of well-known
simplicial tools. Combined with ideas developed by Monod and De la Cruz
Mengual--Hartnick, we deduce slope-1/2 stability results for the bounded
cohomology of two large classes of linear groups: general linear groups over
any ring with finite Bass stable rank and certain automorphism groups of
quadratic modules over the integers or any field of characteristic zero. We
expect that many other results in the literature on homological stability admit
bounded cohomological analogues by applying the blueprint provided in this
work.Comment: 53 pages. Comments welcome