contactive

Adjective

1. 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...
   • Mead's (14) "recommendations" for the control of the spread of the plague in England embodied all the essential principles of restriction of contactive diseases by measures directed to the control of persons and their...
2. 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 -...
   • This causation may be principally of two kinds, "distant" and "contactive". - 2002, Masayoshi Shibatani, The Grammar of Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation, page 11:
   • 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,...
3. 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...
   • 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....
   • It is argued that the feature [contactive] differentiates invitations from other text types. - 1991, Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, page 1214:
4. 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:
5. 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...