1.1. Many students of Leonard Blodmfield's Languaget have been inspired, by the extraordinary insight into grammatical phenomena there shown, to attempt descriptive analysis from that basis. Frequently, however, their hopes of success are dulled somewhat by the singular fact that the material proves more elusive in application than it did in appreciation. In an attempt a couple of years ago to use Bloomfield's principles to analyze the complicated syntax of Mixteco, an Indian language of Mexico,' I came to the conclusion that a slightly different statement of the actual procedure of analysis would facilitate syntactic description; this involved a number of criteria which could be applied consecutively in order to arrive at the ranks and labels of construction. It was only recently, however, that I reached a further conclusion: that part of the difficulty of Bloomfield's material for the beginning student was the lack of clarity in his statements of the relationship between taxemes and tagmemes, and the actual operation with these principles. This paper,3 then, has two goals: first to point out this confusion, and second to outline a procedure which a student can apply to the easier stages of syntactic analysis. The illustrative English material, the phonetic transcriptions, and the definitions are deliberately taken from Bloomfield, and constant references are given to his material, to enable the student to correlate this brief study with his more complete descriptive presentation.