Tagmemics

The Tagmemik is a linguistic direction within the American structuralism.

Theory

The Tagmemik tried to describe linguistic regularities in the socio- cultural context. The linguistic and extra-linguistic behavior should be assessed not only by a particular grammar, but in the context of the communicative and sociological as well as the cultural contexts in which people perform language activities. The theoretical underpinnings of Tagmemik provide the theories Leonard Bloomfield and the model of descriptive linguistics. Tagmemik is mainly associated with the linguists and missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and Wycliffe Bible Translators, and is applied in practice, especially in the translation of the Bible in so far only partially explored languages. Outside the circle of SIL / WBL has the Tagmemik only a few representatives.

Kenneth Lee Pike is the founder and well-known representative of the Tagmemik. He tried in 1954 with " Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior", show a general taxonomy of human behavior. The German title was " language in relation to an integrated theory of structure of human behavior ."

At the core of his remarks is the assumption that the individual linguistic levels of description are to each other very closely intertwined. The individual levels are hierarchically below syntax in word, phrase, sentence, sentence complex, paragraph and discourse.

The smallest unit of grammatical description (ie not as the smallest linguistic unit ) takes a set tagmeme the Pike, which has already been defined Bloom box. He called Day meme as " correlates of syntagmatic and paradigmatic functions fillings " (Slot -Filler - correlation). Syntagmatic functions (the hard term function was carried slot (space) replaced) are about the object or the subject. Paradigmatic fillings ( fillers ) to replace the subject, such as proper names, personal pronouns or nouns. Syntagmeme be represented in so-called tagmemischen formulas.

Several Tagmene together result in turn Syntagmeme (including structures). The integration of the different levels makes it necessary for the analysis to isolate the components of a higher order than Tagmems Syntagmeme the level below and watch it. The analysis of a paragraph thus also requires an analysis of the set of complexes contained in the paragraph, which in turn consist of phrases that are made up of words.

The Tagmemik also distinguishes and in contrast to the other structuralist grammatical concepts between " emic " and " etic " elements. This distinction applies to Pike in all its linguistic descriptions.

Research priorities of the Tagmemik refer to semantically - ethnolinguistic problems (eg, studies of kinship terms in different languages ​​), but mainly due to the inclusion of non-verbal, paralinguistic aspects in the language description.

PM Postal sees the Tagmemik as "a subtype of the PSG theory " ( phrase structure grammar ). He has proved that the tagmemischen formulas represent a finite set of context-free phrase structure rules, which are handled differently only in the tagmemischen notation.

Quotes

• "The Day meme unites in a single unit a function ( = slot, the author) into a larger structure and a class of items fulfilling did function ( = fillers, author); it is defined as the correlation of a grammatical function or slot with a class of mutually substitutable items Occurring in slot did. " (B. Elson, V. Pickett, 1964.54 )