The morphotactics of the Tigrinya verb is replete with dependencies which span the verb stem: (1) the negative circumfix ay-n, (2) absence of the negative suffix -n following a subordinating prefix, (3) constraints on combinations of subject agreement prefixes and suffixes in the imperfective and jussive, (4) constraints on combinations of subject agreement affixes and object suffixes.
this presents problems in the case of non-concatenative morphology: discontinuous morphemes (circumfix-ation); infixation, which breaks up a morpheme by inserting another within it; reduplication, by which part or all of some morpheme is copied; and the template morphology (also called stempattern morphology, intercalation, and interdigitation) that characterizes Semitic languages, and which is the focus of much of this paper.