contactive
contactive adjective: involving or pertaining to direct physical contact.
Adjective
contactive
- Involving or pertaining to direct physical contact.
- Contactive memory, the recollection of the surfaces or forms which we have palped or handled .1845, Francis Fauvel-Gouraud, Phreno-mnemotechny: Or, The Art of Memory, page 40
- We may imagine, that traces of organic substances, mixed with the hydrocyanic acid, gradually decompose it by a contactive process; and that sulphuric acid hinders the process by charring these matters.1853, Gabriel Gustav Valentin, A Text Book of Physiology, page 104
- Implying direct or physical contact.
- Thus the proposed definition explains why the suffixes -aa and -vaa sometimes fail to signal the contrast between contactive and non-contactive causation.1982, George Melville Bolling, Bernard Bloch, Language - Volume 58, page 827
- This causation may be principally of two kinds, "distant" and "contactive".2002, Masayoshi Shibatani, The Grammar of Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation, page 11
- Serving to initiate contact; introductory.
- Contactive language resembles ritual language in its formulistic character ( " How are you," "What's new?" etc. ) but differs in its tone and purpose.1972, Henry F. Beechhold, John L. Behling, The Science of Language and the Art of Teaching, page 27
- Slightly more complex than impulsive patterns are contactive patterns. Contactive patterns are most frequently used when we are attempting to initiate "contact" or gain the attention of another person.1983, John R. Bittner, Each Other: An Introduction to Interpersonal Communication, page 122
- Produced by the contact of air with an object (such as the sound produced by blowing over the lip of a bottle), as opposed to being produced by vibrations on the part of an object.
- Articulate sounds, when made pulsative, are heard aloud; when made merely contactive, without vibration of the windpipe, they produce a whisper.1843, Smith Bartlett Goodenow, An Essay on English Grammar, page 12
- Contiguous but not coordinated
- In a complex distribution, if both of the contactive units are chains, there can be a reduction in the total of inferences only if one of the chains is in a simple distribution with a third chain and the interval is unoccupied.2018, Isidore Dyen, Linguistic Subgrouping and Lexicostatistics, page 73
Examples of contactive in a sentence
- More generally, semantically absolutive normally marks an entity as participating as a whole in the situation identified by the verb, though not necessarily contactive, involving location.2006, John M. Anderson, Modern Grammars of Case, page 131:
- In series, re and direct object òè 'leg' join gbe to express contactive 'kick.'2016, Ronald P. Schaefer, Francis O. Egbokhare, A Grammar of Emai, page 631:
- It is argued that the feature [contactive] differentiates invitations from other text types.1991, Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, page 1214:
- Similarly, overviews of the evening's program or of the program for the following day should be understood as part of the contactive dimension.1994, Jürgen E. Müller, Towards a Pragmatics of the Audiovisual: Theory and History, page 115:
Words formed from contactive
Questions about contactive
- What does contactive mean?
- Contactive means involving or pertaining to direct physical contact.
- How do you use contactive in a sentence?
- More generally, semantically absolutive normally marks an entity as participating as a whole in the situation identified by the verb, though not necessarily contactive, involving location.
- What part of speech is contactive?
- Contactive is an adjective.
Words near contactive in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: contactive (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “contactive.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/contactive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.