microsemantics

Microsemantics is a subfield of linguistics and philosophy of language that focuses on the meaning of the smallest linguistic units—morphemes, words, and fixed phrases—and on how those meanings contribute to the interpretation of larger expressions. It is often contrasted with macrosemantics, which concerns sentence and discourse meaning.

Core concerns of microsemantics include sense and reference, lexical ambiguity, polysemy, compositionality, and lexical pragmatics. The distinction between sense (a word’s inherent meaning) and reference (the thing it denotes) is central; polysemy involves related senses, whereas homonymy involves distinct senses. Idioms and fixed expressions pose a particular challenge for compositional semantics, as their figurative meaning may not be predictable from parts alone.

The field draws on multiple theoretical approaches. Formal semantics uses truth-conditions and lambda calculus to model word meaning, while cognitive and usage-based theories emphasize mental representations and context-sensitive interpretation. Distributional and computational methods, such as word embeddings, model microsemantic relationships statistically, though with different assumptions about how meaning is represented.

In applied contexts, microsemantics informs lexicography, language education, natural language processing, and knowledge representation. It intersects with lexical pragmatics when contextual inference modifies how a word is understood, and with cross-linguistic studies through phenomena such as polysemy and translation choices. Overall, microsemantics seeks to clarify how the smallest units contribute to meaning within larger linguistic structures, bridging theoretical analysis and practical language use.