A Brief History of Tagmemic Discourse Theory

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.

Please Contact Me Via E-mail: