mimeme

plural mimemes

1. A unit of mimetic information.

   Speech learning is a mimetic process. The linguistic signal is a ‘mimeme’.

   1955, Leonard Robert Palmer, Achaeans and Indo-Europeans: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 4 November 1954, page 8

   3 more examples

   Language depends on mimism – the repercussion, in the composition of an individual’s gestures, of ocular mimemes – which takes two forms: phonomimism and cinemimism.

   1978, Ted Polhemus, editor, The Body Reader: Social Aspects of the Human Body, →ISBN, page 276

   The process of miming however, mimage, is a conscientizing process: the cosmos plays into the anthropos, and, [born] mimer, the anthropos replays its actions in mimemes or mimismic gestures.” These mimemes, and their expression, gestes, are therefore always potentially conscious, and memory, being the sum of our mimemes, is replay, anthropological replay, and therefore always with a degree of consciousness. Through mimage, actions that became mimemes are expressed as gestes:[…]

   2018, Marcel Jousse, translated by Edgard R. Sienaert, Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers: The Galilean Oral-Style Tradition and Its Traditionists (Biblical Performance Criticism; volume 15), Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, →ISBN, page 3

   In the words of Jean-Marie Schaeffer, a fiction “should be announced as fiction, the function of this announcement being to institute the pragmatic frame that limits the space of the game at the interior of which the semblance can operate without representation induced by the mimemes being treated in the same manner as would be the ‘real’ representations mimed by the fictional device.”

   2021, Éric Rebillard, The Early Martyr Narratives: Neither Authentic Accounts Nor Forgeries, University of Pennsylvania Press, →ISBN, pages 63–64