Monad granularity

What on earth is monad granularity?!?

It's one of those useful principles for structuring the monad stream.

Monad granularity refers to:

That's a long definition. Can you break it down?

Sure.

1. The object type: The monad granularity is defined in terms of one or more object types.

2. that is lowest in all hierarchies of object types: All object types will likely have a placement in a hierarchy of object types, where objects of each type are usually contained in each other in hierarchical fashion. This need not be strict hierarchies: They can be recursive. But usually, there will be some least textual element which is at the base of all hierarchies. Usually, this will be Word, Morpheme, or Grapheme (or letter). In other words, this is the stuff out of which the text is made at the lowest level. What the lowest level is depends on your application. If you are not interested in individual words, but in, say, speaker turns only, then speaker turns should be the lowest level.

3. and which therefore should be assigned the smallest (contiguous) monad sets: It stands to reason that if an object type is lowest in a containment hierarchy, then its units will also be the smallest textually. Therefore, they should have the smallest sets of monads.

   However, notice what the definition does not say.

   It does not say that these "smallest sets" should be made up of single monads (i.e., be singletons). They can be any size -- 1,2,50,100 monads long.

   They should, however, ideally be contiguous. This is because the topographic query language depends on the contiguity of the monad stream.

Can you give another definition?

Here is a simpler one. Monad granularity refers to: