An Overview 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.

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.

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

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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