TAGMEMIC DISCOURSE THEORY

This document contains all of the materials found in the separate pages found in the frames document version. 


New Resource: THE TAGMEMIC CONTRIBUTION TO COMPOSITION TEACHING

Dr. Bruce L. Edwards

Professor of English 
Associate Dean for Distance Education and International Programs
Continuing & Extended Education
Bowling Green State University 
Bowling Green, Ohio 43403

e-mail: edwards@bgnet.bgsu.edu

This web site contains these sections:

1. OVERVIEW AND SUMMARY
2. SURVEY OF TAGMEMIC DISCOURSE PRINCIPLES
3. ADVANTAGES OF TAGMEMIC DISCOURSE THEORY
4. DISCERNING THE UNIQUE FETAURES OF TDT>
5. WHAT IS TAGMEMICS GOOD FOR?
6. TAGMEMIC DISCOURSE MODELS
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY

All materials © 1996, Bruce L. Edwards. All rights reserved.

1. OVERVIEW AND SUMMARY

Tagmemic discourse theory, as developed from the work of linguist, Kenneth L. Pike, is a theory of discourse founded upon certain axioms about human behavior and language use that foreground the situatedness of all communication and the necessity of viewing every act of discourse as a form-meaning composite inseparable from communicators, their audiences, and the varied worlds they may construct and inhabit through the use of language.

At Left: Evelyn and Kenneth Pike, circa 1979.

Kenneth L. Pike's evolving linguistic theory, tagmemics, has focused from its inception upon solving the problems Bible translators face in understanding and describing languages in primarily oral cultures. (It should be noted that Evelyn Pike has had a considerable influence on the development of tagmemic discourse theory; see Bibliography below.) While devising practical tools of inquiry for identifying and charting similarities and differences in target languages lacking an alphabet or codified grammar, Pike intuited that the resolution of translators' challenges lay both beyond the sentence in discourse and beyond discourse itself in the socio-cultural frameworks in which language is used. Pike and his colleagues thus began to formulate a theory of discourse based upon the centrality of language use to human rationality and to the building of human community.

Out of this originally linguistic inquiry have come the bases of tagmemic rhetoric, which posits composing as a problem-solving process and recenters the goal of rhetoric away from the narrower concerns of Aristotelian persuasion toward the broader goal of building bridges between rhetors who profess potentially conflicting worldviews, bridges that make possible both discovery of alternatives and volitional change. Pike and other tagmemic rhetoricians concluded, contra Noam Chomsky, that no theory of syntax and no rhetoric that ignored the situational context of utterances--and thereby programmatically dismissing inquiry into the cultural bases of thought and communication--could yield insights into the nature of language acquisition or use. More importantly, such theories could not produce ultimately useful tools or strategies with which to investigate and solve actual communication problems.

When Pike's tagmemics came to the attention of his University of Michigan colleagues Richard Young and Alton Becker in the 1960s, together these three began the task of harvesting Pike's insights for a "modern theory of rhetoric," a theory most fully articulated in their 1970 textbook, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. Seeking to free rhetoric from a moribund "current- traditional" model that seemed to them to emphasize a product- oriented pedagogy focused primarily on style and arrangement, the authors' broad purpose was to restore invention to its proper place at the heart of practical rhetoric and to reconceive writing as a discovery, i.e., "problem-solving" process that could be assisted by systematic heuristic tools.

Young, Becker, and Pike found the communication strategies derived from work of psychotherapist, Carl Rogers, most congenial to their evolving modern rhetoric, specifically his emphasis on reducing an audience's sense of threat so that they are able to understand and then consider alternatives to their own belief system.

Rogerian principles meshed well with Pike's concepts of "etic" and "emic" perspectives in language inquiry, i.e., the distinction between "alien" and "native" perspectives on discourse generation and reception, and the necessity of finding the right bridge or "tagmeme" that would yield mutual insight. From the tagmemic point of view, every rhetor's task is inevitably analogous to the kinds of challenges "alien" translators in a new cultural environment encounter: locating a point of entry into a particular language ambiguity, problem, or challenge that will provide a true bridge for nonthreatening exchange and that, therefore, might make possible meaningful change. Thus, in tagmemic terms, a rhetorical task involves deliberately leaving behind a default "etic" or outsider's perspective on data under consideration, and employing heuristics that assist a communicator in approximating an "emic" or insider's perspective conducive to reaching the projected audience.

Rhetoric: Discovery and Change consequently defines composing in terms of four components: (1) preparation; (2) incubation; (3) illumination; and (4) verification. In the preparation stage, a writer seeks to identify and explore the nature of a problem or felt dissonance, and is assisted by systematic heuristic inquiry, exemplified in the textbook by the "tagmemic discovery matrix." This nine-celled, multiperspectival grid has become well known apart from the textbook, offering users particle, wave, and field views of data arrayed according to its contrastive/identificational features, its range of variation, and its distribution in context.

The incubation stage names a period of "subconscious" exploration during which a writer is less inclined to perform analytical inquiry and depends more upon the intuitive or "creative" activity of the mind for contribution to the task at hand. During the illumination stage, the writer is poised to hypothesize a solution based upon both analytical and nonanalytical means, producing a "leap," as it were, to imaginative insight that can be neither forced nor placed on a timetable. The fourth stage, verification, consists of some test of the hypothesis, using the criteria of correspondence, consistency, and usefulness, and reflects the tagmemic principle that all hypotheses and theories must ultimately be testable to be productive of insight.

Researchers and theorists such as Janice Lauer and Lee Odell have investigated the effectiveness of Young, Becker, and Pike's heuristics and related tagmemic principles, attempting to verify experimentally the utility and theoretical soundness of tagmemic postulates for a variety of applications in composition, including, especially, the teaching of invention. As tagmemic rhetoric has emerged within the field of rhetoric and composition, it has faced opposition to its assertion that its axioms hold true not only for language inquiry but for all of human behavior. Nevertheless, tagmemic rhetoricians continue to investigate and proffer viewpoints upon not only literacy and pedagogically-related issues but also the complexities of human psychology and anthropology, pursuing advances that illuminate the taxonomic, epistemic, and heuristic functions of language in human discourse toward the project of building an ever-more comprehensive theory of human behavior.

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2. SURVEY OF TAGMEMIC DISCOURSE PRINCIPLES

ETICITY: surface, distant, reality-as-appearance, outsider objectivity. Initial etic inquiry typically yields particles whose wave or field relationships (i.e., situatedness) to other particles are undetected, indistinct, or ambiguous and which must be identified before progress can be made toward emic understanding.

 

EMICITY: deeper, reality-as-experience, insider-subjectivity. ìEticî inquiry, informed by incrementally more accurate and comprehensive account of particles as understood and experienced within wave/field realationships by insiders, yields ever closer approximation of ìalienî meaning.

2.1 SIX STARTING POINTS

A. Tagmemic Discourse Theory (TDT) searches for a natural way into a text or experience (i.e., looks for the appropriate tagmeme , or unit-in-context, that will provide fruitful pathways of inquiry to discover other features of the phenomenon under investigation)

SUPPOSITION: One needs or must want to find a way ìinî and brings along a finite set of goals.

B. TDT begins with what one knows.

SUPPOSITION: There will be particles, recognizably repeatable units, and/or larger contextual (wave/field) cues and clues that will provide helpful information along the road of inquiry.

C. TDT tries to learn as much from the text/experience in view before moving outside of it.

SUPPOSITION: No text or experience is self-explanatory or self-evident, and one's account of it will by necessity entail discovering and breeching boundaries beyond the unit under investigation; however, the unit with which one is concerned must be thoroughly canvassed before inquiring elsewhere.

D. TDT is prepared to discover or generate questions or problems, unanticipated in the initial approach to the unit under investigation, which will yield new goals, different insights, and further pathways for study.

SUPPOSITION: One will form a series of mini-hypotheses in the processs of inquiry that will be affirmed, rejected, or modified in the process of interacting with the unit under investigation.

E. TDT creates appropriate landmarks by which the investigator can judge the effectiveness or fruitfulness of a line of inquiry.

SUPPOSITION: Not all pathways yield relevant, problem-solving information; intuition, previous experience, corroborative testimony, et al. is necessary to check oneís strategies that the data they yield.

F. TDT pursues inquiry until original goals, new goals, or modified goals are reached and corroborated by both etic and emic measures.

SUPPOSITION: Knowing when to stop comes from experience and accumulated expertise, i.e., the development of ìindigenous approximation skills.

2.2 USEFUL TAGMEMIC TOOLS AND CONCEPTS

A. Particle, wave, and field perspectives (epistemological/observer functions)

B. Contrastive/identificational, variable, distributive features (ontological functions)

C. Nuclearity and Marginality as vantage points

D. Tagmemic/contextual relationships: slot, class, role, cohesion

2.3 A TAGMEMIC DISCOURSE ANALYSIS WILL:

• Entail a systematic/systemic approach that develops a comprehensive partice, wave, field analysis of those features of the text/experience (contrastive/identificational, variable, distributive) that illuminate the goal or prospectus that generated the inquiry.
• Yield, in Pikean terms, that set of tagmemes that identify or otherwise contribute to an increasingly emic understanding of a text, experience, phenomenon.
• Make only those knowledge claims that can be corroborated by both emic and etic measures, i.e., claims resulting from tagmemic inquiry depend upon both outsider and insider testimony that the claims are plausible, tolerably complete, and noncontradictory.
• Be as thick as is appropriate to the original or modified inquiry goals: the tagmemicist ìstopsî at whatever level of detail or insight--alwyas informed by multicontextual cues and clues--that satisfies the inquirerÃs questions or problems-to-be-solved.

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3. ADVANTAGES OF TAGMEMIC DISCOURSE THEORY

• Places no artificial limitation on the subject matter, its form or nature, that can be investigated under its aegis.
• Insists on epistemological and ontological bases for the conclusions it draws.
• Demands attention to situatedness of language and language behavior at every level of inquiry.
• Anticipates observer bias and endeavors to articulate and incorporate it into the investigation as a factor with which to be reckoned.
• Creates a versatile lexicon of useful terms and concepts to identify, describe, differentiate, and contextualize the nature/features of a unit under inquiry--whether it is a linguistic, rhetorical, or behavioral phenomenon.
• Provides a set of systematic heuristic tools and a consistent notation system to explore, examine, and test the acceptability and accuracy of emerging descriptions of data and relationships within and among it.
• Projects dissonance and/or anomaly as clues and cues to more ultimate levels of reality rather than as negatives to be explained away or subsumed in a contrived, homogenized description.
• Affirms universals of language and behavior that cross cultures, languages, genders.
• Privileges persons above abstractions, community over autonomy, philosophical wholism over reductionism.
• Accommodates multiple motivations, worldviews, research modes in its attempts to confront the complexity, uniqueness, and vitality of human personhood and communication.

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4. DISCERNING THE UNIQUE FEATURES OF TAGMEMIC DISCOURSE THEORY

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5. WHAT IS TAGMEMICS GOOD FOR?

5.1 GENERAL

• Investigating the surfacely "known" and deepening one's understanding of its situated context, its component parts, the range, nature, and quality of its impact on surrounding data/phenomena, and their reciprocal impact on it.
• Discovering the nature, qualities, features, impact, et al. of the unknown as it is situated in its environment.
• Taxonomizing a phenomenon, labelling its features, component parts, situated context, et al.
• Corroborating the nature, qualities, features, impact, et al. of a phenomenon as previously identified or described by another observer/inquirer.
• Providing a stable set of tenets, concepts, terms, heuristics, notation system, for investigating, describing, and evaluating language and behavioral phenomena up and down a scale of micro-/telescopic vantage points.

5.2 SPECIFIC

• Codifying the phonological, grammatical, and referential hierarchies of language and language behavior.
• Supplying the conceptual framework to investigate rhetorical issues and problems at any level of discourse, at any level of entry, at any level of specificity or detail.
• Incorporating new insights from both complementary and competing models of language and discourse by virtue of its multiperspectival, inclusivist methodology.
• Modelling genres of discourse across cultures and language base to permit comparison, translation, testability.
• Diagnosing the sources of miscommunication, ambiguity, and/or rhetorical failure in a particular discourse.
• Predicting the impact of a particular discourse or discourse behavior in a specified context.
• Uniting through its interdisciplinarity diverse approaches to language study and theory-building about language and language behavior.

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6. TAGMEMIC DISCOURSE MODELS

6.1. Tagmemic Musings on Rhetoric as Social

• We are both inside and outside of the worlds we inhabit, i.e., we are emic and etic to ourselves and to other selves. We look out at the world as we know it from various locations within those worlds. We are always at once both "different" and "same" to ourselves and others.
• Truth is ascertainable even by finite creatures, but subject to verification and falsification from references points situated within worldviews to which we can have access to via interpretative bridges facilitated by "native" knowers and oustide observers.
• Such truth, though never available exhaustively to us, may tolerably capture the world as it is in ever increasing accuracy, an approximation through language, mediated by personal presence.
• A concept of objective reality that eludes our complete grasp but rewards those who diligently seek it, is essential to good faith inquiry of any kind, including language-based inquiry, and of any communication model which claims insight into humanness.

6.2 Foundations of a Tagmemically-Inspired Communication Model

• A confessional metaphysics, which grounds truth-seeking and truth-conveying outside the interlocutors' particularist worldviews.
• An understanding of the symbolization of experience and consciousness in speech and text as a basic human facility and faculty, which, as a set of tools, are at once:
1. World-ordering (taxonomic)
2. World-discovering (heuristic)
3. World-fashioning (managerial)
4. World-founding (epistemic)

6.3. A Tagmemic Syllabus

1. Understanding the places of conventions in language within a particular universe/community of disocurse: emic/etic exercises; nuclear/marginal exercises; problem-solving exercises.
2. Inquiry assignments that move from the frame of self (emic) to other (etic), i.e., discourse that moves from personal narrative to other forms; continual movement between private and public, self and other, through language-based bridges.
3. Text-making that moves from the frame of other (etic, i.e., research) to self (emic, i.e., the incarnation of self in other frames of reference [worlds], employing, shaping, and reshaping its lexicon, syntax, etc.)
4. Genres of report: the public presentation of self/other in various forms of discourse sensitive to community and projected audience.

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7. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY