Kenneth Pike

Kenneth Pike was an American linguist who developed tagmemics, a theory of grammar analyzing language in terms of units that combine both grammatical function and the specific forms that can fill that function. Pike is also widely credited with coining the influential terms emic and etic, derived by analogy from the linguistic terms phonemic and phonetic, to distinguish an analysis of a culture or behavior from the perspective of its own internal system, the emic view, from an analysis using externally imposed, cross-culturally comparable categories, the etic view, a distinction that spread well beyond linguistics into anthropology and the social sciences generally. As a longtime leader of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Pike trained and directed generations of field linguists in the practical documentation of previously unwritten languages, and he pioneered techniques, including his own monolingual demonstration method, for beginning to analyze a language's sound system and grammar without relying on a shared language with its speakers. His extensive fieldwork on Mesoamerican languages, particularly Mixtec, informed both his theoretical work on tagmemics and his broader influence on the practice of descriptive field linguistics.