microlinguistics (n.)

A term used by some linguists, especially in the 1950s, to refer to the main areas of LINGUISTICS, especially PHONOLOGY, MORPHOLOGY and SYNTAX, these being seen as constituting a sharply defined field of study differentiable from PRELINGUISTICS and METALINGUISTICS. In this frame of reference, it was seen as a branch of MACROLINGUISTICS. More broadly, the term can be used to distinguish complementary views of a subject, one being strictly linguistic, the other being wider; for example, a study of MEANING which concentrates on DENOTATIVE meaning and does not take SOCIOLINGUISTIC, etc., factors into account might be called microlinguistic (as opposed to ‘macrolinguistic’) semantics.

The term ‘microlinguistic’ is sometimes used outside this framework in a general sense, to refer to any analysis of linguistic data involving a maximum depth of detail. Likewise, the term microsociolinguistic (opposed to ‘macro-’) is sometimes found.