Wong, Jock (2017). The ‘emes’ of linguistics. In Keith Allan, Alessandro Capone, & Istvan Kecskes (Eds.), Pragmemes and theories of language use (pp. 567-583). Berlin: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-43491-9_29.
The three formal ‘emes’ of linguistics, phonemes, morphemes and lexemes, are among the things all 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. 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. It argues that it is indeed a helpful notion for analytical and pedagogic purposes, provided it is expressed in irreducible semantic elements and given a cultural interpretation.
