The ‘emes’ of linguistics

Abstract

The three formal ‘emes’ of linguistics, phonemes, morphemes and lexemes are among the things first year linguistics students learn. However, while most linguistics students know what the formal emes are, the idea of a pragmeme, a concept conceived by preeminent scholar Jacob Mey, may be less familiar. A pragmeme has been defined as ‘a situated speech act’ by Alessandro Capone but one may ask whether it is a pragmatic analogue to the formal memes and how helpful the concept is for our understanding of pragmatics. This paper explores the notion of a pragmeme and argues that it is indeed a helpful notion for analytical and pedagogic purposes but it must first be expressed in irreducible semantic elements and given a cultural interpretation before it can be of any significant use.