Meanings
- not comparablehuman sciencesPertaining 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.
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.
2012, Viveka Velupillai, An Introduction to Linguistic Typology, →ISBN, page 1082 more examples
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.
1991, Hansjakob Seiler, Waldfried Premper, Partizipation, →ISBN, page 635The 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.
1999, Masayoshi Shibatani, Theodora Bynon, Approaches to Language Typology, →ISBN, page 57
Cite this entry
introflexive. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/introflexive
“introflexive.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/introflexive. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “introflexive,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/introflexive.
Source: introflexive on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.