infixlike

Infixlike is a term used in linguistics to describe morphemes or internal segments that behave like infixes—inserted inside a base word—yet do not always conform to the canonical, positionally fixed pattern of true infixes. The label signals a surface parallel to infixes while allowing for variation in where the segment attaches, how it is realized, or how it is analyzed in the morphosyntactic system of a language.

Infixlike phenomena can arise in several ways. Some languages show a consistent internal insertion after the first consonant or syllable that cannot be easily described as a simple prefix or suffix. In other cases, what looks internally like an infix may instead be better analyzed as an internal vowel change, a templatic pattern, or a circumfix across a stem boundary, depending on the theoretical framework. The term is therefore primarily descriptive, not a strict morphosyntactic category, and its exact meaning depends on the language description and the analyst's theory.

In computational morphology and descriptive grammars, infixlike analyses help model internal insertions that lack a firmly fixed position or that interact with phonology; such analyses appear in finite-state models and cross-linguistic morphosyntactic descriptions. Related concepts include infix, circumfix, internal affix, clitic, and templatic morphology.