tmesis

tmesis as a linguistic phenomenon requires language to operate — you cannot split a word that does not exist. Language is constitutive of tmesis, not merely facilitative.

Tmesis (interruption of a word by an intervening word, e.g. 'fan-bloody-tastic') IS a specific kind of figure of speech. A competent speaker of English would classify tmesis as a figure of speech. Specific to general per Law 9.

Tmesis inserts a morpheme into the middle of a word or compound. Remove stem — the target word being split has no structural base and tmesis stops operating. Genuine structural dependency.

Tmesis inserts an affix into the middle of a base word — it requires morphemes as the structural material being split; without morphemes, tmesis has nothing to operate on.

Pinned sense (the surviving holder's accepted definition): tmesis as the operation of inserting grammatically independent material into a word's interior. That is a specific word-formation process under the word-formation carve: existing lexical material in (the host word), a new word form out (the split form), conventional/rule-governed in the speech community. The board's own word-formation definition names tmesis among its members. Nearest-kind: no accepted kind interposes between tmesis and word-formation — the holder's accepted INSTANCE_OF to figure-of-speech pins the EXPRESSIVE sense (a rhetorical figure) and does not stand in the word-formation ladder; the two edges carry different senses and both may stand (Law 11d).

Tmesis is a constituent process within the morphological system — the operation of inserting a grammatically independent element into a word's interior. Per the morphology definition, the discipline's domain includes the processes of word-formation; the word-formation definition names tmesis among its members. Whole→part: tmesis is a part of morphology's domain of study.