Sat 11 April 2020 Week 10 Lecture 8

Sat. 11 April 2020. Week 10: Lecture (8) Faculty of Arts, Banha Unversity Department of English Language & Literature Subject: Lecturer: Grade: Schools of Linguistics Dr. Mariana Adel Sedki First Year The 20 th. C Linguistics : Continued Post-Bloomfieldianism (pp. 23, 64, 65, 66, 67)

Bloomfield’s successors, in the 1940 s and 1950 s, took his ideas to extremes in developing American structuralism. The Post-Bloomfieldian era was an era of a very rapid change both in theory and methods. One of the most influential theories of this school of linguistics was theory of Tagmemics /tægmi: miks/ presented by the American linguist Kenneth L. Pike. Tagmemics is a system of analysis developed by Kenneth Pike in the 1950’s. The theory tried to get away from the over-concentration of Bloomfieldians on classes at the expense of functions, and focused on the need to relate linguistic forms and functions.

Pike developed the notion of tagmeme: a composite unit which combines two terms, i. e. class (V, VP, N, NP, Adj, Adv, . . ) and function (subject, predicate, object, complement, head, predicator, modifier. . . ). Tagmeme = function + class (place/slot) + (filler) In other words, a tagmeme correlates a grammatical position /a functional element or ‘slot’ (e. g. subject) with a formal element / a member of the relevant class of fillers(e. g. noun). So it is a relation between the syntagmatic function and the paradigmatic fillers.

For example, the sentence ‘The boy has the keys’ has three tagmemes: 1 - S : NP (the subject slot is filled by the noun phrase ‘the boy’). 2 - Pred : TVP (the predicate slot is filled by transitive verb phrase ‘has’). 3 - O : NP (the object slot is filled by the noun phrase ‘the keys’). Another example : ‘John ran’ has two tagmemes. 1 - S : N (the subject slot is filled by the proper noun ’John’). 2 - Pred : V (the predicate slot is filled by the intransitive verb ‘ran’). So tagmemes combine to form a syntagmeme (a syntactic construction consisting of a sequence of tagmemes. A sentence can be analyzed into a sequence of tagmemes, each of which provides information about the ‘class’ to which it belongs and the ‘function’ in which it performs.

One major difference between Pike’s tagmemic analysis and Bloomfield’s immediate constituent analysis of sentence structures is the binary cut between the nominal group and the verbal group of the sentence. In the IC analysis, the sentence is cut into two parts (S: NP+ VP). The binary division continues till the ultimate constituent s /the level of the smallest units. On the contrary, tagmemics is a string of constituent analysis.

For example; the sentence ‘they play football’ can be analyzed as: 1 - S NP+ VP (they+ ‘play football’) VP V + NP (play + football) S = sentence, NP= noun phrase, VP= verb phrase, V= verb 2 - S : Pn + Pred : V + O: NP S= subject : Pn= pronoun Pred= predicate: V= verb O= object: NP= noun phrase Good luck Dr. MARIANA ADEL SEDKI