a system of linguistic analysis developed by the American linguist Kenneth L. Pike in the 1950s and applied to the description of a very large number of hitherto unrecorded languages. Tagmemics differs from alternative systems of grammatical analysis in that it defines the basic units of language (tagmemes) as composite elements, one part being the “slot,” or “function,” and the other the “filler,” or “class.” For example, one such tagmeme, at the syntactic level of analysis, might be the noun-as-subject (in which the noun is a class that “fills” the subject “slot” in a construction).