microformal

English

Etymology

micro- +‎ formal

Adjective

microformal (not comparable)

1. (music) Pertaining to the internal structure of a single phrase.
   • 1984, Mario Baroni, Laura Callegari Hill, Musical grammars and computer analysis, page 209:

     For example, the note values and tonality of a phrase cannot be chosen independently of those of the other phrases; and similar restirctions apply also for many other microformal characteristics.

   • 1989, Stephen McAdams, Irène Deliège, Music and the Cognitive Sciences, →ISBN:

     However, the results of the research do implicitly show how musical form reflects and implies some of these mental devices. In the first two repertories examined, the rules have been divided into two categories: macroformal and microformal rules.

   • 1993, Goffredo Haus, Music Processing, page 7:

     General similarities and symmetries, broad tonal relationships, compass of parts, and so forth belong to the macroformal plane, while internal phrase structure, pitch contour, rhythmic peculiarities, and the like belong to the microformal plane (Baroni and Callegari 1989).

   • 2009, Paul-André Bempéchat, Jean Cras, Polymath of Music and Letters, →ISBN, page 242:

     Each section harbours a ternary microformal pattern based upon its own thematic content.

2. (literature, poetry) Pertaining to the characteristics and patterns of lines or phrases, as opposed to the structure of the entire work.
   • 1993, Claudio Guillén, The challenge of comparative literature - Volume 42‎^[1], page 174:

     Other microformal characteristics also mark these traditional, oral tales, such as the absence of the necessary enjambment — the basic element is the line or the hemistich, as also in the romancero -- and what Parry calls the thrift of formulaic art ("each position in the verse tends to allow one way rather than many ways of saying any one thing" if we are speaking of a single bard), a quality also found in Hesiod.

   • 2010, Michael Carl Schoenfeldt, Michael Schoenfeldt, A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets, →ISBN, page 254:

     Shakespeare's microformal analysis is the commensurate response to a world of forms emerging into and out of relation.

   • 2015, Evelyn Reynolds, “Beowulf's Poetics of Absorption: Narrative Syntax and the Illusion of Stability in the Fight with Grendel's Mother”, in Essays in Medieval Studies, volume 31:

     Each of these pieces deals with the microformal elements of the text in ways that underpin my larger, structural argument about the imaginative effect of the text.

3. (more generally) Involving structure on a localized, small scale.
   • 1966, Water Power - Volume 18, page 114:

     Both microformal and mesoformal deformations of the bed are considered in the analytical study.

   • 1999, Lauren Rebecca Herckis, Cultural Variation in the Maya City of Palenque (Doctoral dissertation, Anthropology. University of Michigan), page 8:

     A program of excavation in commoner house groups was selected with the intention of recovering a representative sample of diagnostic ceramics, which would be subjected to a fine-grained microformal analysis as well as a battery of standard tests and classification.

4. Having a miniaturized form.
   • 1982, Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference - Volume 20, page 90:

     Respectful of its microformal origins, it is distributed with a microfiche that duplicates the printed version but sometimes contains additional material.

   • 1987, The Ligue, Bulletin - Volumes 29-31, page 49:

     It cannot be the function of a textbook collection to be a kind of microformal university library.

   • 1997, Information Industry Directory - Volumes 1-2, →ISBN, page 52:

     Holdings include 75,000 documents in medical socioeconomics (the SEAM data base of world literature since 1962; updated monthly); a complete file of AMA serial publications in microformal and bound volumes;

5. (chemistry) Involving substances in which extremely small volumes are involved (such as antibiotics, antibodies or viruses).
   • 1965 November-December, Kenneth L. Burdon, Jose T. Queng, Orville C. Thomas, John P. McGovern, “Observations on biochemical abnormalities in hereditary angioneurotic edema”, in Journal of Allergy, volume 36, number 6:

     Hydrolysis of the substrate was measured by a microformal titration, by using 0.05N sodium hydroxide, a manostat microtitrator, and a Beckman Zeromatic pH meter to determine the micromoles of acid liberated in a given time.

   • 1973, Paul J. Edelson, Immunologic Deficiency Syndrome: Papers, →ISBN, page 158:

     Assay of C1 esterase involves microformal titration of the acid liberated from ATEe (a stock concentration of 1.6 M in 2-methoxy-ethanol) during 15-min incubation at 37C according to the method of Levy and Lepow (11).

   • 1980 December, I.H. Al-Abdullah, J. Greally, “Serum C 1 esterase inhibitor—Immunochemical and functional measurements”, in Irish journal of medical science, volume 149, number 1:

     Microformal titration was carried out as described by Levy and Lepow (1959).

6. (mathematics) "Thickened" using formal canonical relations between the cotangent bundles of smooth manifolds.
   • 2015, Theodore Voronov, “Quantum microformal morphisms of supermanifolds: an explicit formula and further properties”, in arXiv‎^[2]:

     They act on oscillatory wave functions, whose algebra extends the algebra of formal power series in Planck's constant. In the classical limit, quantum microformal morphisms reproduce, as the main term of the asymptotic, the nonlinear pullbacks of functions with respect to `classical' microformal morphisms.