Construct · 4 fields · 5 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningpatterncompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to motif is pattern.
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The shortest self-contained musical idea that recurs and develops through a piece, a small group of notes with a distinctive rhythm and shape that a listener recognises when it returns. Adolf Bernhard Marx's 1837 Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition set out the Motiv as the smallest meaningful building block of a melody, from which larger phrases are grown, and Rudolph Reti's 1951 The Thematic Process in Music traced how such a cell is varied and transformed to unify a whole work. The referent is a fragment of melody in a score, counted in notes and beats, and it has nothing to do with a recurring element in a folk tale, a conserved shape in a protein, or a frequent wiring pattern in a network.[1][2]
The smallest element of a story that recurs across many tales and persists as it is retold, such as a magic object, a cruel stepmother, or a test the hero must pass. Stith Thompson's 1932 Motif-Index of Folk-Literature catalogued these narrative units across world tradition and defined a motif as the smallest part of a tale with the power to survive in circulation. The referent is a repeatable ingredient of narrative, counted by its appearances across stories, and it is distinct from a melodic fragment in music, a conserved pattern in a molecule, or a frequent subgraph in a network.[3]
A recurring structural pattern within a large biological molecule, a small arrangement of a few secondary-structure elements (such as two strands joined in a hairpin, or the Greek-key and beta-barrel arrangements) that appears again and again in unrelated proteins. Jane Richardson's 1981 The Anatomy and Taxonomy of Protein Structure named and organised these recurring arrangements, giving the structural motif its working vocabulary, and the same word is used for short conserved runs of sequence that mark a functional site. The referent is a physical or sequence pattern in a macromolecule, identified by structure or by conserved residues, and it is unrelated to a musical fragment, a story element, or a network subgraph.[4]
A small pattern of connections, a particular way that a handful of nodes wire together, that appears in a network far more often than it would in a random network of the same size. Milo, Shen-Orr, Itzkovitz, Kashtan, Chklovskii, and Alon's 2002 Network motifs: simple building blocks of complex networks introduced the term and a method to detect these over-represented subgraphs, finding shared motifs across gene-regulation, neural, ecological, and engineered networks. The referent is a statistically frequent subgraph, counted against a randomised baseline, and it is distinct from a melodic fragment in a score, an element of a folk tale, or a conserved pattern in a protein.[5]
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