Wiktionary
n. 1 The gross structure of a material or tissue as visible to the unaided eye or at very low levels of magnification. 2 (context metallurgy English) The gross structure of a pure metal or alloy, as revealed by magnifications of 10X or less.
Wikipedia
Macrostructure may refer to:
- Macrostructure (sociology)
- Macrostructure (linguistics)
- Macrostructure (psychology)
In sociology, macrostructures, often simply called 'structure', correspond to the overall organization of society, described at a rather large-scale level, featuring for instance social groups, organizations, institutions, nation-states and their respective properties and relations. In this case, societal macrostructures are distinguished from societal microstructures consisting of the situated social interaction of social actors, often described in terms of agency. This distinction in sociology has given rise to the well-known macro-micro debate, in which microsociologists claim the primacy of interaction as the constituents of societal structures, and macrosociologists the primacy of given social structure as a general constraint on interaction.
One important macrostructure is patriarchy, the traditional system of economic and political inequality between women and men in most societies.
In linguistics and discourse analysis, semantic macrostructures are the overall, global meanings of discourse, usually also described in terms of topic, gist, or upshot. These semantic macrostructures (global meanings or topics) are typically expressed in for instance the headlines and lead of a news report, or the title and the abstract of a scholarly article. Macrostructures of discourse are distinguished from its microstructures, that is, the local structures of words, clauses, sentences or turns in conversation. Macrostructures may be derived from microstructures by operations such as abstracting, that is, leaving out or summarizing specific details. Semantic macrostructures or topics define what is called the global coherence of discourse.
This concept was first proposed by Teun A. van Dijk in 1977.
Category:Discourse analysis
In the psychology of discourse processing, it is assumed that language users typically have better memory for the macrostructures than for the microstructures of discourse: After some time people remember the overall topics or gist of a news report much better than its many details.
Usage examples of "macrostructure".
While the long hunt for the value of the Hubble Constant went on, and the debates over cosmic bubbles and macrostructure heated up, Carlisle was always a step behind.
Aurelian Sophotech set up a second levitation array above Western Europe, for the Aryan Individualists, and a third over India, where the Uncomposed Cerebelline art-capital Macrostructure is.
When you were out of short yardsticks you looked for the long ones, the ones that wouldn’t lie, and you started thinking about half-baked theories, like cosmic macrostructures, folded interfaces, or any straw of reason that might give a mind something to work on or suggest a direction they’d gone or offer a hint which of a hundred improbables was the truth.