Sank's Glossary of Linguistics
Inf-Ins |
INFINITIVUS PRO PARTICIPIO
- (Grammar) 'Infinitive instead of participle'. In a verb cluster, the appearance of an infinitive verb form instead of an otherwise expected participle, e.g. in German:
- Ich habeAUX das gewolltPTCP
'I (have) wanted that'
- Ich willMOD das machenINF
'I want to do that'
- Ich habeAUX das machenINF wollenIPP
'I wanted to do that'
| Andrew Hoffman and Mike Putnam, 2022
- (Grammar) The IPP effect involves the appearance of an infinitive where one would normally expect a participle. An example is given in (1).
dat
that
Jan
Jan
het
the
boek
book
heeft
has
willenINF / * gewildPTCP
want / wanted
kopen
buy
'that Jan has wanted to buy the book'
| Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, 1994
INFIXATION
- (Morphology) A morphological process whereby a bound morpheme attaches within a root or stem. The kind of affix involved in this process is called an infix.
In (1), the focus marker -um- is an infix which is added after the first consonant of the root.
- Tagalog (Philippines)
bili: root 'buy'
-um-: infix 'AGT'
bumili: word 'bought'
| SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, 2003
- (Morphology) Operationally, I consider an affix infixing if it appears as a segmentally distinct entity between two strings that form a meaningful unit when combined but do not themselves exist as meaningful parts (1).
- An affix, whose phonetic form is A, is infixed if
the combination of Bi & Bj constitutes exhaustively the non-null parts of the terminal phonetic form of a continuous stem, B,
and the terminal phonetic form of A is both immediately preceded by Bi and also immediately followed by Bj,
without any part of A being simultaneous with any part of B,
and such that Bi and Bj do not by themselves correspond to meanings that would jointly constitute the total meaning of B.
Thus, English expletive (e.g., abso-bloody-lutely) is considered an infix since the expletive (i.e., bloody) is both preceded and followed by non-null and non-meaningful parts (i.e., abso and lutely) of a meaningful non-discontinuous stem (i.e., absolutely) without being simultaneous with any non-null part of the stem.
Note, however, an affix should not be discounted as an infix based on the decomposability of the interrupted stem alone. The morphological hosts of an infix may in fact be complex.
Infixes are not at all difficult to find. English-speaking readers will no doubt recognize some, if not all, of the following infixation constructions:
- Expletive infixation (McCarthy 1982)
impórtant im-bloody-portant
fantástic fan-fuckin-tástic
perháps per-bloody-haps
Kalamazóo Kalama-goddamn-zoo
Tatamagóuchee Tatama-fuckin-gouchee
- Homer-ic infixation (Yu 2004)
saxophone saxomaphone
telephone telemaphone
violin viomalin
Michaelangelo Michamalangelo
- Hip-hop iz-infixation (Viau 2002)
house hizouse
bitch bizitch
soldiers sizoldiers
ahead ahizead
| Alan C. L. Yu, 2007
- (Morphology) Two classes of infixation pattern are generally recognized in the literature:
- Affixation to a Prosodic Constituent
In Ulwa, a Misumalpan language spoken in Nicaragua and Honduras, the
possessive marker -ka- always appears to the right of the stressed syllable. Stress is iambic in Ulwa.
Ulwa possessive construction (McCarthy and Prince 1993)
- bas bás-ka 'hair'
- kiː kíː-ka 'stone'
- sana saná-ka 'deer'
- sapaː sapáː-ka 'forehead'
- suːlu súː-ka-lu 'dog'
- kuhbil kúh-ka-bil 'knife'
- baskarna bás-ka-karna 'comb'
- anaːlaːka anáː-ka-laːka 'chin'
- karasmak karás-ka-mak 'knee'
- Edge-based infixation
In Sundanese, one of the major languages of Indonesia spoken in western Java, the plural marker always appears immediately after the initial consonant of the root.
Plural ar infixation in Sundanese (Robins 1959, McCarthy and Prince 1986)
Singular
niʔis
naho
Plural
nariʔis
naraho
Gloss
'to cool oneself'
'to know'
| Alan C. L. Yu, 2002
INFL
- (Syntax) Name for the verbal inflection of a clause in Government and Binding theory. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2003
- (Syntax) Or, I, or, I0. A functional head containing (in English) auxiliary verbs and/or tense and/or agreement features. More recently, INFL has been reinterpreted as a conflation of two separate heads AGR (agreement) and T (tense). (Chomsky 1981, 1991, Pollock 1989) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
INFLECTIONAL PHRASE (IP)
- (Syntax) Or, inflection phrase. Abbreviated IP or InflP. In X-bar theory and other grammatical theories that incorporate it, an inflectional phrase is a functional phrase that has inflectional properties (such as tense and agreement). An inflectional phrase is essentially the same as a sentence, but it reflects an analysis whereby a sentence can be treated as having a head, complement and specifier, like other kinds of phrases. | Wikipedia, 2015
- (Syntax) TAM [tense-aspect-mood] is commonly known as inflection, that is a word transformation showing gramatical relationship, including nominal declension, pronominal and adjectival, and verb conjugation (Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics 1997, Kridalaksana 1993 [2009]). TAM with any other grammatical category can form the word or phrase, it is called inflectional phrase. Inflectional phrase is the phrase which has tense, aspect, and mood as its core category. | Mirsa Umiyati and Jeladu Kosmas, 2015
INFORMATION STRUCTURE
- (Information Structure) Or, information packaging. A subfield of linguistic research dealing with the arrangement of information in a discourse in order to optimize the transfer of information between the speaker and addressee (hearer/reader). | ?, 2020
- (Information Structure) The term information structure goes back to Halliday (1967 [or 1967]) and has been widely used in the subsequent literature to refer to the partitioning of sentences into categories such as focus, background, topic, comment, theme and rheme, etc. (Ramchand and Rice). Related notions include Chafe's (1976) information packaging as well as the functional sentence perspective of the Prague school (Firbas 1975, Sgall et al. 1986; see Sgall 1993 for a general introduction). There is no consensus on what and how many categories of information structure should be distinguished, or how these can be identified. | Daniel Büring, 2007
- (Information Structure) The packaging of information that meets the immediate communicative needs of the interlocutors, i.e. the techniques whose raison d'être is to optimize the form of the message with the goal that the message be well understood by the addressee in his or her current attentional state.
One such feature, for example, is the highlighting of constituents, which is called focus. In (1), a question creates a particular attentional state, which is recognized by the focus in the answer, expressed by pitch accent on tiger, as shown in small caps in (1a). Pitch accent on road, as in (1b), would lead to an infelicitous answer, even though the truth conditions of (1a) and (1b) are the same, as it does not fit the context question.
- {What did you see on the road?}
a. We saw a TIGER on the road.
b. # We saw a tiger on the ROAD.
| Caroline Féry and Manfred Krifka, 2008
- (Information Structure) Any text in spoken English is organized into what may be called information units. The distribution of the discourse into information units is obligatory in the sense that the text must consist of a sequence of such units. But it is optional in the sense that the speaker is free to decide where each information unit begins and ends, and how it is organized internally; this is not determined for him by the constituent structure. Rather could it be said that the distribution of information specifies a distinct constituent structure on a different plane; this information structure is then mapped on to the constituent structure as specified in terms of sentences, clauses and so forth, neither determining the other. | M.A.K. Halliday, 1967
INFORMATIVITY
(Text Linguistics) This standard of textuality concerns the extent to which the occurrences of the presented text are expected vs. unexpected or known vs. unknown/uncertain. In sample (1a), the assertion that you will not be able to call is much more unexpected than it is in (1b).
- a. Call us before you dig. You may not be able to afterwards.
b. Call us before you dig. There might be an underground cable. If you break the cable, you won't have phone service, and you may get a severe electric shock. Then you won't be able to call us.
The processing of highly informative occurrences is more demanding than otherwise, but it is correspondingly more interesting as well. Caution must be exercised lest the receivers' processing become overloaded to the point of endangering communication. | Robert-Alain de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler, 1981
INHERENT CASE
(Syntax) Or, oblique case. Case which is dependent on theta-marking (as opposed to structural case). Usually Genitive, Dative, and Partitive are considered inherent case.
For example, the assignment of genitive case by a noun is inherent, hence must coincide with theta-marking. This implies that a noun cannot be the case-assigning head in an ECM construction, and no Raising to Subject in an NP is possible. Hence the ill-formedness of (1) and (2):
- * John's belief [ Mary's / of Mary to be a spy ]
- * John's appearance [ t to be a spy ]
Also, case is called inherent if its assignment is an idiosyncratic property of the assigning head. E.g., in German the verb helfen 'to help' assigns Dative to its NP object, instead of (structural) Accusative. (Chomsky 1986) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
INHERENT COMPLEMENT VERB
(Grammar) Antonym, non-inherent complement verb. Nwachukwu (1987) recognizes two types of verb in Igbo. Inherent complement verbs (ICV) are subdivided into transitive and intransitive, while non-inherent complement verbs are divided into transitives, unaccusatives and unergatives. He defines an ICV as a morphological subset of verbs which in its citation form consists of a consonant-vowel (CV) root followed by a free noun (or in very few cases a prepositional phrase). The root and its normal complement form a semantic unit, and any dictionary entry which excludes the complement lacks meaning because the complement is the meaning-specifying constituent of its verb.
Examples of inherent complement verbs in Ngwa Igbo include the following:
- vu-cluster
- vú-ó̥nū̥
carry-mouth.IC3
'fast'
- vù-ívù
get.fat-fat.IC
'be fat'
- tu̥-cluster
- tú̥-lʼányá
hit-at.eye.IC
'be surprised'
- tú̥-ò̥mú̥
hit-palmfrond.IC
'summon'
- ku̥-cluster
- kú-ílú
be bitter-bitter.IC
'be bitter'
- kú̥-égō
make-money.IC
'make money'
- ma-cluster
- má-ḿmā
be beautiful.IC
'be beautiful'
- má-ḿkpūrú
tie cloth (on body).IC
'tie cloth'
| Ogbonna Anyanwu, 2012
INITIAL CONSONANT MUTATION
(Phonology) Word-initial consonant changes (without restricting to those that could be described as lenition) of various kinds are discussed in Iosad (2010). He gives Initial Consonant Mutation (ICM) the following definition:
Initial consonant mutation refers to a change in the featural make-up of the initial consonant in a word, the context for which cannot be
stated exclusively in terms of independently pronounceable phonetic or phonological entities. (Iosad 2010)
As examples of languages that exhibit ICM, he lists Welsh (and its Celtic relatives), Nivkh, dialects of Italian, Fula (Niger-Congo), Nias (Austronesian), Burmese, and also some examples from Australia and the Americas. Important notions in Iosad's (2010) study are trigger and target. Target is the word undergoing the initial alternation; trigger is the preceding lexical item which causes the following consonant to change. Following the definition above, at least the trigger but sometimes both the trigger and the target need to fulfil certain non-phonological criteria for the consonant mutation to occur. Consider the following example from Welsh:
- a. tŷ
house
'house'
b. dy dŷ
2SG house
'your house'
c. fy nhŷ
1SG house
'my house'
d. ei thŷ
3SG.F house
'her house'
The initial consonant (phonetically [th]) of the citation form in (1a)
lenites to [d̥] in (1b), nasalizes to [n̥h] in (1c), and spirantizes to [θ] in (1d). The terms used in Celtic studies are Soft Mutation, Nasal Mutation, and Aspirate Mutation, respectively. Note that in (1b) and (1c), the target
undergoes different kinds of mutation despite the identical final segments in the pronouns; the possessive pronouns act as lexical triggers. | Juha Luukkonen, 2015
See Also CONSONANT MUTATION.
INQUISITIVE SEMANTICS
(Semantics) A framework for the formal analysis of information exchange. It is based on a notion of semantic content which, unlike the traditional truth-conditional notion, captures both informative and inquisitive aspects of meaning. It allows for a unified analysis of statements and questions, as well as linguistic elements that interact with both statements and questions, such as modals, quantifiers, connectives, and discourse particles.
In inquisitive semantics (IS), an utterance is intuitively seen as a proposal to update the already established information in one or more ways. Statements propose a single update. Questions propose two or more alternative updates. This makes questions inquisitive: they invite a response from the addressee that establishes at least one of the proposed alternative updates.
The way in which IS enriches the notion of meaning changes our perspective on logic as well. Besides the classical notion of logical entailment, the semantics also gives rise to a new notion of inquisitive entailment and a more general treatment of logical operators such as connectives (e.g. and, or, if, not), quantifiers (e.g., some, all), and modal operators (e.g., must, may, know, believe, wonder).
The way in which IS enriches the notion of meaning also changes our perspective on pragmatics. The main objective of pragmatics is to explain aspects of interpretation that are not directly dictated by semantic content in terms of general features of rational human behavior. Since IS offers a richer notion of semantic content, pragmatics becomes richer as well. Traditional Gricean pragmatics consists exclusively of speaker-oriented rules for providing information. Inquisitive pragmatics has the same basic objective, but is more general: it is both speaker- and hearer-oriented, and specifies rules for exchanging information rather than just providing information. This makes it possible to derive a wider range of implicatures, in particular ones that arise from inquisitiveness. | Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk, and Floris Roelofsen, 2013
INQUISITIVE SPEECH ACT
(Semantics)
Inquisitive Speech Act
A speech act 𝒜 is inquisitive relative to a context c iff the issue it places on the Table has more than one possible resolution in c.
Assertions are non-inquisitive because they denote singleton propositions independently of the context.
Non-rhetorical questions are inquisitive because they denote non-singleton issues in contexts compatible with more than one resolution.
Rhetorical questions (RhQs) are non-inquisitive:
- The redundancy of RhQs renders them non-inquisitive, a property they share with assertions: there is at most one way of resolving the issue they express because either there is only one p ∈ I that is consistent with cgi or there is no p ∈ I that is consistent with cgi.
- Because they are non-inquisitive, both assertions and RhQs may go unanswered.
- Just like assertions, Speaker makes a non-trivial commitment when uttering a RhQ; unlike assertions, in the case of RhQs, that commitment is a mandatory implicature.
- Unlike assertions, and like canonical questions, the issue expressed by a RhQ is non-singleton.
| Donka F. Farkas, 2023
INSTRUMENT ROLE
(Semantics) Taking the example of the Instrument role, a wide range of participants have Instrument-like properties (Koenig, Mauner, Bienvenue, and Conklin 2008, Nilsen 1973, Rissman and Rawlins 2017, Schlesinger 1995):
- Janine ate the custard with a spoon.
- Wanda accidentally drew on her shirt with a marker.
- Renée applied the lipstick with her fingertips.
- Carlos carried the milk in a bucket.
- Anita went to Amsterdam by train.
- The cue ball hit the red ball which sunk the eight ball.
- Tyrell used the steamy room to practice yoga.
- The bomb blast destroyed the abandoned factory.
- The program completed the algorithm in five seconds.
| Lilia Rissman and Asifa Majid, 2019
Page Last Modified July 30, 2024