Konfiks

Konfiks is a term used in morphology to describe a class of bound morphemes that attach to a word base at two externally anchored points, effectively surrounding the base. A konfiks consists of two or more segments that appear before and after the root, and are interpreted as a single morpheme by the language’s grammar. This contrasts with typical prefixes and suffixes, which attach to a single edge, and with infixes, which insert inside the base.

In structure and function, konfiks may be derivational, creating new lexical forms, or inflectional, signaling tense, aspect, mood, number, or voice. They often require phonological adjustments to the surrounding segments and may show allomorphy conditioned by the phonology of the stem or by harmony processes. The two constituent parts of a konfiks can be fixed or show internal variation across forms.

Distribution and analysis vary in the literature. Konfiks are not widely attested in the world's major language families, but they appear in certain isolated or constructed languages, where they are used to model non-concatenative or circumfix-like morphology. Some authors treat konfiks as a subtype of circumfix or as a distinct category within bound morphemes, while others use the term interchangeably with related concepts.

Example (illustrative): a hypothetical konfiks consists of the pre-segment pa- and the post-segment -la attached to a root R, yielding pa-R-la, with the overall meaning determined by the language's grammatical rules rather than by the segments alone.

See also: circumfix, confix, infix, affix, morphology.