ABSTRACT
The term tagmeme was used by Bloomfield (1933/5) to stand for the smallest unit of grammatical form which has meaning. A tagmeme could consist of one or more taxemes, ‘the smallest unit [of grammar] which distinguishes meanings, but which has no meaning itself’ (Dinneen, 1967, p. 264). The notion of the tagmeme was developed largely by Kenneth Lee Pike (1912-) (1967, 1982; but see also Longacre 1964, 1970, 1976, 1983) into a fullblown grammatical theory, called tagmemics, although the assumptions on which the theory is based are such that language cannot be viewed as a self-contained system and that linguistics, therefore, cannot be self-contained either, but must draw on insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so on (Jones, 1980, p. 78).
