Microphrases

Microphrases are very short phrases, typically consisting of one to four words, that convey a complete communicative function in everyday speech. They act as modular units speakers can reuse to initiate, respond, request, apologize, or acknowledge concise information.

They are usually fixed or semi-fixed and rely on conventional phrasing with high frequency across languages. Their pragmatic force depends on context and prosody; when used in conversation, microphrases help manage turn-taking and social stance with minimal lexical material.

Applications include language learning, where instructors and learners use microphrases to accelerate fluency; corpus linguistics and natural language processing, where they are treated as unit segments for annotation, phrase-based modeling, and dialog management; and user interface design, where microphrases improve guidance, prompts, and politeness strategies in chatbots and virtual assistants.

Common microphrases include "Hello there," "Thank you," "Please," "Could you help?," "I understand," "Nice to meet you," "What time is it?," and "Let me check."

See also: formulaic language, collocation, utterance, pragmatics.