Tagmemics is a linguistic theory developed by Kenneth L. Pike

Kenneth L. Pike

Kenneth Lee Pike , also known during his life as Ken Pike, was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was the originator of the theory of tagmemics and coiner of the terms "emic" and "etic".-Life:...

 in his book Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, 3 vol. (1954–1960). It was primarily designed to assist linguists

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 to efficiently extract coherent descriptions out of corpora of field work data. Tagmemics is particularly associated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics

SIL International

SIL International is a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages,...

, an association of missionary linguists devoted largely to Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 translations, of which Pike was one of the earliest members.

Tagmemics makes the kind of distinction made between phone and phoneme

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

 in phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

 and phonetics

Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...

 at higher levels of linguistic analysis (grammatical

Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

 and semantic

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

); for instance, contextually conditioned synonyms are considered different instances of a single tagmeme

Tagmeme

In tagmemic linguistics, the tagmeme is the smallest functional element in the grammatical structure of a language. It is the correlation of a syntagmatic function and paradigmatic fillers...

, as sounds which are (in a given language) contextually conditioned are allophone

Allophone

In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

s of a single phoneme. The emic and etic

Emic and etic

Emic and etic are terms used by anthropologists and by others in the social and behavioral sciences to refer to two kinds of data concerning human behavior...

distinction can also be applied in other social sciences.

External links

• The Tagmemics Page (Dr. Bruce L. Edwards)
• Tagmemics: The linguistic theory of everything (Joe Kissell)
• SIL Bibliography on Tagmemics
• Overview of Tagmemics as Children's Book