Tagmemics is a linguistic theory developed by Kenneth L. Pike 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 to efficiently extract coherent descriptions out of corpora of field work data. Tagmemics is particularly associated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an association of missionary linguists devoted largely to Bible translations, of which Pike was one of the earliest members. Kenneth L. Pike (June 9, 1912 - December 31, 2000) was an American linguist and anthropologist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the originator of the theory of tagmemics and coiner of the terms emic and etic. From 1947 to 1979 he was the first president of the Summer... 1954 was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1960 was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... SIL International is a non-profit, Christian, scientific organization with the main purpose to study, develop and document lesser-known languages for the purpose of expanding linguistic knowledge, promoting world literacy and aiding minority language development. ... The holy Jewish scripture: The Torah. ...

Tagmemics makes the kind of distinction made between phone and phoneme in phonology and phonetics at higher levels of linguistic analysis (grammatical and semantic); for instance, contextually conditioned synonyms are considered different instances of a single tagmeme, as sounds which are (in a given language) contextually conditioned are allophones of a single phoneme. The emic and etic distinction can also be applied in other social sciences. In phonetics and phonology, a phone is a speech sound considered as a physical event without regard to its place in the sound system semantics of a language. ... In oral language, a phoneme is the theoretical basic unit of sound that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes; in sign language, it is a similarly basic unit of hand shape, motion, position, or facial expression. ... Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics closely associated with phonetics. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Grammar is the discovery, enunciation, and study of rules governing the use of language. ... In the main, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ... In Tagmemic linguistics, the smallest functional element in the grammatical structure of a language. ... In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme. ... Emic and etic are terms used by some in the social sciences and the behavioral sciences to refer to two different kinds of data concerning human behavior. ...

Links

• The Tagmemics Page (Dr. Bruce L. Edwards)
• Tagmemics: The linguistic theory of everything (Joe Kissell)