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T Tagmemics A modern theory of linguistics and, derivatively, of rhetoric, originated by Kenneth L. Pike, that has influenced language study through its advocacy of multiperspectival approaches to language inquiry. The term tagmemics denotes a set of theoretical and practical insights into textuality and human language behavior derived primarily from the research of linguist Kenneth L. Pike. Pike began his career as a virtually self-taught translator among the Mixtec of Mexico and was eventually more formally educated as a linguist under the tutelage of Edward Sapir at the University of Michigan. His earliest publications, c. 1937-1942, focused on phonetics, as Pike attempted to assist linguists and translators facing the bewildering task of understanding and describing languages in primary oral cultures that lacked an alphabet or codified grammar. He concluded that this endeavor was not well assisted by existing structuralist and behaviorist models of language, given their limiting conceptual vocabulary, notation system, and field methods. Consequently, Pike and other early tagmemicists such as Robert E. Longacre addressed these concerns with an aggressive and innovative inquiry into the social foundations of the phonology, morphology, syntactics, and ethno-epistemology of the peoples among whom his translator teams were living.