Tagmemics Applications

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.

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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TAGMEMIC DISCOURSE MODELS

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.

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)

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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