preverb

Although not used in general linguistic theory, the term preverb is used in Caucasian (including all three families: Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian and Kartvelian), Caddoan, Athabaskan, and Algonquian linguistics to describe certain elements prefixed to verbs. In the context of Indo-European languages, the term is usually used for separable verb prefixes.

Theoretically, any prefix could be called a preverbal element. However, in practice, the term preverb applies more narrowly in those families and refers to a prefixed element that is normally outside the premise of verbal morphology like locations of noun elements or, less often, noun elements themselves.