María Catrileo's Works on the Tagmemics of Mapuche Currently, she is working the Institute of Linguistics and Literature of the Austral University of Chile, where she holds courses in Mapudungun.
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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 Summer Institute of Linguistics, an association of missionary linguists devoted largely to Bible translations, of which Pike was an early member.
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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 also applies in other social sciences.
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Bloomfield's term was adopted by Kenneth Pike and others to denote what they had previously been calling the grammeme (earlier grameme).Pike, K.L. (1958), "On tagmemes, née gramemes", International Journal of American Linguistics 24(4):273ff. 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.
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A tagmeme is the smallest functional element in the grammatical structure of a language. The term was introduced in the 1930s by the linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who defined it as the smallest meaningful unit of grammatical form (analogous to the morpheme, defined as the smallest meaningful unit of lexical form). The term was later adopted, and its meaning broadened, by Kenneth Pike and others beginning in the 1950s, as the basis for their tagmemics.
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Kenneth Lee Pike (June 9, 1912 - December 31, 2000) was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was the originator of the theory of tagmemics, the coiner of the terms "emic" and "etic" and the developer of the constructed language Kalaba-X for use in teaching the theory and practice of translation. In addition, he was the First President of the Bible-translating organization Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), with which he was associated from 1942 until his death.David Crystal (2011).
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Advocates of formal evolutionary explanation in linguistics argue that linguistic structures are crystallised. Inspired by 19th century advances in crystallography, Schleicher argued that different types of languages are like plants, animals and crystals. The idea of linguistic structures as frozen drops was revived in tagmemics, an approach to linguistics with the goal to uncover divine symmetries underlying all languages, as if caused by the Creation. In modern biolinguistics, the X-bar tree is argued to be like natural systems such as ferromagnetic droplets and botanic forms.
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SIL's work has resulted in over 20,000 technical publications, all of which are listed in the SIL Bibliography.. Most of these are a reflection of linguistic fieldwork.. SIL's focus has not been on the development of new linguistic theories, but tagmemics, though no longer promoted by SIL, was developed by Kenneth Pike, who also coined the words emic and etic, more widely used today in anthropology.Headland et. al. 1990. Another focus of SIL is literacy work, particularly in indigenous languages. SIL assists local, regional, and national agencies that are developing formal and informal education in vernacular languages.
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Pike developed his theory of tagmemics to help with the analysis of languages from Central and South America, by identifying (using both semantic and syntactic elements) strings of linguistic elements capable of playing a number of different roles. Pike's approach to the study of language put him outside the circle of the "generative" movement begun by Noam Chomsky, a dominant linguist, since Pike believed that the structure of language should be studied in context, not just single sentences, as seen in the title of his magnum opus "Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior" (1967). He became well known for his "monolingual demonstrations". He would stand before an audience, with a large number of chalkboards.
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