# Tagmeme > Mediated Wiki article. Canonical URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/Tagmeme > Markdown URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/Tagmeme.md > Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagmeme > Source revision: 1301687220 > License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) Grammatical unit For the Tagmemics punk band, see [The Art Attacks](/source/The_Art_Attacks). "Noeme" redirects here. For the agent of the global brain, see [Technoself § Noeme](/source/Technoself#Noeme). "Pheneme" redirects here; not to be confused with [Phememe](/source/Phememe). Grammatical features Related to nouns Animacy Case Dative construction Dative shift Quirky subject Nominative Comitative Instrumental Classifier Measure word Construct state Countability Count noun Mass noun Collective noun Definiteness Gender Genitive construction Possession Suffixaufnahme (case stacking) Noun class Number Singular Dual Plural Singulative–Collective–Plurative Specificity Universal grinder Related to verbs Associated motion Clusivity Conjugation Evidentiality Modality Person Telicity Mirativity Tense–aspect–mood Grammatical aspect Lexical aspect (Aktionsart) Mood Tense Voice General features Affect Boundedness Comparison (degree) Egophoricity Pluractionality (verbal number) Honorifics (politeness) Polarity Reciprocity Reflexive pronoun Reflexive verb Syntax relationships Argument Transitivity Valency Branching Serial verb construction Traditional grammar Predicate Subject Object Adjunct Predicative Semantics Contrast Mirativity Thematic relation Agent Patient Topic and Comment Focus Volition Veridicality Phenomena Agreement Polypersonal agreement Declension Empty category Incorporation Inflection Markedness v t e A **tagmeme** is the smallest functional element in the [grammatical](/source/Grammar) structure of a language. The term was introduced in the 1930s by the linguist [Leonard Bloomfield](/source/Leonard_Bloomfield), who defined it as the smallest [meaningful](/source/Meaning_(linguistic)) unit of grammatical form (analogous to the [morpheme](/source/Morpheme), defined as the smallest meaningful unit of [lexical](/source/Lexis_(linguistics)) form). The term was later adopted, and its meaning broadened, by [Kenneth Pike](/source/Kenneth_Pike) and others beginning in the 1950s, as the basis for their **tagmemics**. ## Bloomfield's scheme According to the scheme set out by [Leonard Bloomfield](/source/Leonard_Bloomfield) in his book *Language* (1933), the tagmeme is the smallest meaningful unit of grammatical form.[1] A tagmeme consists of one or more **taxemes**, where a taxeme is a primitive grammatical feature, in the same way that a [phoneme](/source/Phoneme) is a primitive phonological feature. Taxemes and phonemes do not as a rule have meaning on their own, but combine into tagmemes and [morphemes](/source/Morpheme) respectively, which carry meaning. For example, an utterance such as "John runs" is a concrete example of a tagmeme (an **allotagm**) whose meaning is that an actor performs an action. The taxemes making up this tagmeme include the selection of a [nominative](/source/Nominative) expression, the selection of a [finite verb](/source/Finite_verb) expression, and the ordering of the two such that the nominative expression precedes the finite verb expression. Bloomfield makes the taxeme and tagmeme part of a system of [emic units](/source/Emic_unit):[2] - The smallest (and meaningless, when taken by itself) unit of linguistic signaling is the **pheneme**; this may be either lexical ([phoneme](/source/Phoneme)) or grammatical (taxeme). - The smallest meaningful unit of linguistic signaling is the [glosseme](/source/Glosseme), either lexical ([morpheme](/source/Morpheme)) or grammatical (tagmeme). - The meaning of a glosseme is a **noeme**, the meaning of either a morpheme ([sememe](/source/Sememe)) or a tagmeme (**episememe**). More generally, he defines any meaningful unit of linguistic signaling (not necessarily smallest) as a *linguistic form*, and its meaning as a *linguistic meaning*; it may be either a *lexical form* (with a *lexical meaning*) or a *grammatical form* (with a *grammatical meaning*). ## Pike and tagmemics Bloomfield's term was adopted by [Kenneth Pike](/source/Kenneth_Pike) and others to denote what they had previously been calling the *[grammeme](/source/Grammeme)* (earlier *grameme*).[3] In Pike's approach, consequently called *tagmemics*, the hierarchical organization of levels (e.g. in syntax: word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, discourse) results from the fact that the elements of a tagmeme on a higher level (e.g. 'sentence') are analyzed as syntagmemes on the next lower level (e.g. 'phrase'). The tagmeme is the correlation of a [syntagmatic](/source/Syntagmatic_analysis) function (e.g. subject, object) and [paradigmatic](/source/Paradigmatic_analysis) fillers (e.g. nouns, pronouns or proper nouns as possible fillers of the subject position). Tagmemes combine to form a **syntagmeme**, a syntactic construction consisting of a sequence of tagmemes. Tagmemics as a linguistic methodology was developed by 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 fieldwork data. Tagmemics is particularly associated with the early work of the [Summer Institute of Linguistics](/source/SIL_International), an association of missionary linguists devoted largely to [Bible](/source/Bible) translations, of which Pike was an early member. Tagmemics makes the kind of distinction made between [phone](/source/Phone_(phonetics)) and [phoneme](/source/Phoneme) in [phonology](/source/Phonology) and [phonetics](/source/Phonetics) at higher levels of linguistic analysis ([grammatical](/source/Grammar) and [semantic](/source/Semantics)); 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](/source/Allophone) of a single phoneme. The [emic and etic](/source/Emic_and_etic) distinction also applies in other [social sciences](/source/Social_sciences). ## References 1. **[^](#cite_ref-1)** Bloomfield, Leonard (1933), *Language*, New York: Henry Holt, pp. 166–169. 1. **[^](#cite_ref-2)** Bloomfield, op.cit., p. 264. 1. **[^](#cite_ref-3)** Pike, K.L. (1958), "On tagmemes, née gramemes", *International Journal of American Linguistics* 24(4):273ff. ## Bibliography - Cook, Walter Anthony (1969), *Introduction to tagmemic analysis*, Transatlantic series in linguistics, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, [ISBN](/source/ISBN_(identifier)) [978-0-03-077115-6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-03-077115-6) - Longacre, Robert E. (1965), "Some Fundamental Insights of Tagmemics", *Language*, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 65–76, [ISSN](/source/ISSN_(identifier)) [0097-8507](https://search.worldcat.org/issn/0097-8507), [JSTOR](/source/JSTOR_(identifier)) [411852](https://www.jstor.org/stable/411852) - Pike, Kenneth L. (2015) [1967], [*Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior*](https://books.google.com/books?id=I4sbDgAAQBAJ), Walter de Gruyter, [ISBN](/source/ISBN_(identifier)) [978-3-11-165715-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-3-11-165715-8) - ——— (1982), *Linguistic concepts: an introduction to tagmemics*, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [ISBN](/source/ISBN_(identifier)) [978-0-8032-3664-6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-8032-3664-6) - Trask, Robert L. (2003) [1993], *A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics*, London: Routledge, [ISBN](/source/ISBN_(identifier)) [978-0-415-07809-2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-415-07809-2) - Waterhouse, Viola G. (1974), *The History and Development of Tagmemics*, Janua Linguarum. Series Critica, vol. 16, Mouton, [ISBN](/source/ISBN_(identifier)) [978-3-110-99501-5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-3-110-99501-5) ## External links Look up ***[tagmemics](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tagmemics)*** in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. - [The Tagmemics Page](http://personal.bgsu.edu/~edwards/tags.html) [Archived](https://web.archive.org/web/20110606065640/http://personal.bgsu.edu/~edwards/tags.html) 2011-06-06 at the [Wayback Machine](/source/Wayback_Machine) (Dr. Bruce L. Edwards) - [Tagmemics: The linguistic theory of everything](http://itotd.com/articles/428/tagmemics/) [Archived](https://web.archive.org/web/20110611040538/http://itotd.com/articles/428/tagmemics/) 2011-06-11 at the [Wayback Machine](/source/Wayback_Machine) (Joe Kissell) - [SIL Bibliography on Tagmemics](http://www.ethnologue.com/show_subject.asp?code=TAG) - [Overview of Tagmemics as Children's Book](https://web.archive.org/web/20160322170318/http://learningbox.com/tagmemics/) - [Lareau, François. "2 The notions of grammeme and grammatical unit." Igor Boguslavsky and Leo Wanner (eds.): 146.](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.359.4023&rep=rep1&type=pdf#page=155) Authority control databases National United States Israel Other Yale LUX --- Adapted from the Wikipedia article [Tagmeme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagmeme) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagmeme?action=history)). 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