is a primitive phonological feature. Taxemes and phonemes do not as a rule have meaning on their own, but combine into tagmemes and morphemes respectively, which carry meaning.

For example, an utterance such as "John runs" is a concrete example of a tagmeme (an allotagm) whose meaning is that an actor performs an action. The taxemes making up this tagmeme include the selection of a nominative expression, the selection of a finite verb