A term proposed by Kenneth L. Pike to denote the most basic units of communicative behavior, whether verbal or nonverbal.
What is the phoneme for linguistic research as a system of aural signs is the same acteme for the study of communications as a behavioral system.
While Pike‘s distinction between emic and etic is used in many studies, his terms acteme and behavioreme are not used outside of narrow scientific circles. However, these terms represent an illustration of persistent and important trends in modern semiotics: they serve to apply the model of structural linguistics to something other than language.
From this perspective, language explains by identifying its most basic units (phoneme at the sound level and sememe at the level of meaning) and by finding its most basic combinatorial rules. Only certain ways of combining the most basic units are allowed or allowed in each language. Some general language rules are only adequate to a certain set of language tools, which allows the creation of rules governing the discovery and ability to combine the most basic language units.
The meaning of Pike‘s terms is to provide a resource for analyzing and discovering any form of behavior, web or other. In the same way, the general theory of signs is a theory of signs in general, and not only concerning this or that kind of signs; for everything that could be significant, i.e. sign.
The need to achieve such a generalization can be found in many contexts, even in those in which the investigator is busy combining in a coordinated form some specific fields of semiotic research.
