Tagmemics

vTagmemics

            Tagmemics is Kenneth Lee Pike’s theory of linguistic analysis. It is a part of structuralism. Structuralism gives no importance to the function of al linguistic form, but it concentrates only on form. While tagmemics combines both the function of a form and the form itself. The concept  is very clear and easily understandable.  . it is very simple straightforward. According to him, a word can be analyzed at three levels. These three levels are lexical in which the minimum unit is the morpheme, phonological in which the minimum unit is the phoneme; and grammatical in which the minimum unit is the ‘tagmeme’. As grammatical construction  is a series of syntactic statement which include sentence, clause, phrases and word they are the formal unity of language.

            Tagmemics is a slot and filler grammar. A slot means a position in the construction of a sentence. i.e. noun, verb,, object or an adverb. A filler means a word which fills particular slot. Tanmeme show the relation between a slot and word which works as the filler by neither as slot not a filler in itself is important . It is the Tanmeme which is important.

            The slot is function. The filler is the category. A tagmeme shows relations between a slot and the words which can fill that position which can be used in that slot that way, we have sentence level tagmemes, clause level tagmemes, phrase level tagmemers, wood level tagmemes and morpheme lever tagmemes. For example the sentence, ‘He likes cricket’ has tree tagmemes, the subject slot is filled by the pronoun ‘he’, the predicate slot is filled by the transitive verb, likes’ and the object’’ slot is filled by the noun’ cricket’ it can be presented it in the form of a formula as below,

S/Pr+p/V++o/n

(S-subject, pn-pronoun, p-predicate, tv- transitive verb, o-object and n-noun. )