introflexive

English

Etymology

By surface analysis, intro- +‎ flex +‎ -ive. Further etymology unknown.

Adjective

introflexive (not comparable)

1. (linguistics) Pertaining to languages in which grammatical information is conveyed through the insertion of a pattern of vowels into a consonantal root, also called root-and-pattern.
   • 1991, Hansjakob Seiler, Waldfried Premper, Partizipation, →ISBN, page 635:

     Considering the effect segmentation has on this introflexive type it may be viewed as a special case of the agglutinative type: Every "normal" word (word stem) can be broken down into a (discontinuous) root (normally consisting of three consonants C₁C₂C₃) and a stem-constitutive morpheme: fataha 'to open (tr.)' must be analyzed as /f...t...h/ 'OPEN' (the root) plus /CaCaCa/, which represnents the basic verbal stem, also called the first (verbal) stem or stem I.

   • 1999, Masayoshi Shibatani, Theodora Bynon, Approaches to Language Typology, →ISBN, page 57:

     The introflexive type is relatively strongly developed in the Semitic languages; it never serves as a basis for the whole structure of a language, but is always combined with another, more extensively developed type.

   • 2012, Viveka Velupillai, An Introduction to Linguistic Typology, →ISBN, page 108:

     The above sections have shown that there is much more to morphological typology than the traditional scale ranging from isolating to introflexive languages given in (27) can capture.