INALIENABLE POSSESSION

1. (Semantics) The possessive relation that a person has with his body parts or properties, as distinguished from the possessive relation with things that he can give away or lose.
   1. Inalienable possession
      John has blue eyes.
   2. Alienable possession
      John has a blue car.
    The notion of inalienable possession is also used to explicate the ambiguity of e.g. John broke his leg: In the reading which is closest to John's leg broke, his designates inalienable possession. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Morphology) The Oceanic group contains 450-odd languages, and, not surprisingly, there is a fair amount of variation in the systems of attributive possessive constructions. At the same time, however, there is a pattern that can be considered typical. The pattern is typical in that it is widespread in Oceanic and is found in different primary subgroups. In this typical pattern there is a basic binary division between direct and indirect possessive constructions. In the direct possessive type the possessum noun carries a possessive suffix that indexes the possessor. In the indirect possessive type the same set of possessive suffixes indexing the possessor is added not to the possessum noun but to a possessive classifier.
    The formal difference between the direct and the indirect possessive construction types is coupled with a semantic/pragmatic difference. While there may be exceptions in individual languages, the general pattern is for the direct construction to express inalienable possession and for the indirect constructions to express alienable possession. Typically included in the inalienable possession category are the following relations between possessum and possessor:
   1. Kinship relations and other social/cultural relations; e.g. father, spouse, trading partner.
   2. The possessum is part of the possessor; e.g. head, nose, branch (of tree).
   3. The possessum is something emanating from the possessor’s body; e.g. sweat, smell, voice.
   4. The possessum is something on the surface of the possessor’s body; e.g. tattoo, dirt, clothing (when being worn).
   5. Mental organs, states, products of mental processes; e.g. mind, fear, thought.
   6. Various attributes of possessors, such as name ( by which the possessor is known), age, height.
   7. Spatial and temporal relations, such as beside (X is beside "possessor") and after (time after "possessor time", e.g. 'after four days').
   8. The possessor is a patient or theme or stimulus in a situation, such as a blow received by the possessor or medicine for the possessor.
    | Frantisek Lichtenberk, Jyotsna Vaid, and Hsin-Chin Chen, 2011

INCHOATIVE

1. (Grammar) Or, inceptive. An inchoative verb shows a process of beginning or becoming. Productive inchoative affixes exist in several languages, including the suffixes present in Latin and Ancient Greek, and consequently some Romance languages.
    Not all verbs with inchoative suffixes have retained their inceptive meaning. In Italian, for example, present indicative finisco 'I finish' contains the form of the suffix, while present indicative finiamo 'we finish' does not, yet the only difference in meaning is that of person subject; the suffix is now semantically inert. | Wikipedia, 2022
2. (Grammar) Denoting an aspect of a verb expressing the beginning of an action, typically one occurring of its own accord. In many English verbs, inchoative uses alternate systematically with causative uses. | ?

INCLUSIVENESS CONDITION

1. (Syntax) Condition that the output of a system does not contain anything beyond its input. Proposed in Chomsky (1995) as a condition met by the computational system of human language. Taken to imply that the interface levels contain nothing more than arrangements of lexical features.
    A language which meets the inclusiveness condition cannot contain traces or indices left after movement. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Syntax) Given a phonetic form (PF) representation π and a logical form (LF) representation λ, the computational system of human language, C_HL, maps a numeration to (π, λ). According to Chomsky (1995, 2000), this mapping procedure is subject to an inviolable principle referred to as the Inclusiveness Condition (IC), which precludes features absent in the numeration from entering C_HL. | Minoru Fukuda, 2013
3. (Syntax) Given the numeration N, C_HL computes until it forms a derivation that converges at PF and LF with the pair (π, λ) after reducing to zero (if it does). A "perfect language" should meet the condition of inclusiveness: any structure formed by the computation (in particular, π and λ) is constituted of elements already present in the lexical items selected for N; no new objects are added in the course of computation apart from rearrangements of lexical properties (in particular, no indices, bar levels in the sense of X-bar theory, etc). Let us assume that this condition holds (virtually) of the computation from N to LF (N → λ); standard theories take it to be radically false for the computation to PF. | Noam Chomsky, 1995

INCORPORATION

1. (Morphology) The compounding of a word (typically a verb or preposition) with another element (typically a noun, pronoun, or adverb). The compound serves the combined syntactic function of both elements. There exists a substantial literature on noun incorporation. Much less is known about pronoun incorporation, due largely to the difficulty of distinguishing incorporation from agreement or cliticization. | Donna B. Gerdts, 2017
2. (Morphology) A phenomenon by which a word, usually a verb, forms a kind of compound with, for instance, its direct object or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function.
    Incorporation is central to many polysynthetic languages. | Wikipedia, 2022
3. (Morphology) Can be described as the inclusion of one lexical element in another lexical element such that they together constitute a single word (Mithun 1994, Gerdts 1998, Haugen 2015). While this process is relatively rare in most well-known European languages, it is applied productively in various other languages, many of which are generally considered polysynthetic (Haspelmath and Sims 2010, Murasugi 2014) and most of which are spoken in North and South America, Northern Australia, Austronesia and Siberia (Mithun 1994, Velupillai 2012). The most widely investigated type of incorporation is noun incorporation (Gerdts 1998, Iturrioz Leza 2001), in which a nominal argument, typically an object, or modifier of a verb is incorporated into this verb (Mithun 2000, Haugen 2015). An example of such an incorporation construction in Chukchi is shown in (1b).
   1. Incorporation of a nominal stem into a verb in Chukchi (Kurebito 2012)
      a.
       

      ʔətt-e
      dog-ERG

      piri-nin-ø
      catch-3SG>3SG-PST

      melota-lγən
      hare-ABS.SG

        'The dog caught the hare.'
      b.
       

      ʔətt-ə-n
      dog-E-ABS.SG

      milute-piri-γʔi-ø
      hare-catch-3SG.S-PST

        'The dog caught a hare.'
    | Marieke Olthof, 2019

INCREMENTAL INTERPRETATION
(Psycholinguistics) In recent years psycholinguistic evidence for incremental interpretation has become more and more compelling, suggesting that humans perform semantic interpretation before constituent boundaries, possibly word by word.
 Incremental interpretation allows on-line semantic filtering, i.e. parses of initial fragments which have an implausible or anomalous interpretation are rejected, thereby preventing ambiguities from multiplying as the parse proceeds. | David Milward and Robin Cooper, 1995

INDEPENDENT PERSONAL PRONOUN
(Grammar) In contrast to bound forms (i.e. clitics and affixes). Separate words capable of taking primary stress. Virtually all languages have independent personal pronouns, though in some they occur rather infrequently. | Anna Siewierska, 2003

INDEPENDENT PRONOUN
(Grammar) A pronoun that's used independently. That is, it syntactically functions to fill both the noun and determiner slots of a determined noun phrase. Contrast dependent pronouns, which function as determiners.
 In English, most pronouns can be used as independent pronouns. The only pronouns that cannot be used independently are the dependent possessive pronouns, which must be used dependently. Instead, we use the independent possessive pronouns.

1. We say
   1. The pen is mine. (independent possessive pronoun)
       not
   2. * The pen is my.  (dependent possessive pronoun)

INDEX
(Syntax) Diacritic to indicate coreference, as in:

1. John_i loves himself_i

INDEXICAL
(Semantics) Roughly speaking, a linguistic expression whose reference can shift from context to context. For example, the indexical you may refer to one person in one context and to another person in another context. Other paradigmatic examples of indexicals are I, here, today, yesterday, he, she, and that. Two speakers who utter a single sentence that contains an indexical may say different things. For instance, when both John and Mary utter I am hungry, Mary says that she is hungry, whereas John says that he is hungry.
 Many philosophers hold that indexicals have two sorts of meaning. The first sort of meaning is often called linguistic meaning or character (the latter term is due to David Kaplan 1989). The second sort of meaning is often called content. Using this terminology, we can say that every indexical has a single unvarying character, but may vary in content from context to context. | David Braun, 2015

INDEXICAL ORDER

1. (Sociolinguistics) Silverstein (2003) claims that the notion of an "indexical order" is necessary if we are "to relate the micro-social to the macro-social frames of analysis of any sociolinguistic phenomenon". He describes the relationship between Agha's notion of a register and indexical orders as follows:

   The existence of registers ... is an aspect of the dialectical process of "indexical order", in which the n+1st-order indexicality depends on the existence of a cultural schema of enregisterment of forms perceived to be involved in n–th order indexical meaningfulness; the forms as they are swept up in the n+1st order valorization become strongly presupposing indexes of that enregistered order, and therefore in particular of the ideological ethno-metapragmatics that constitutes it and endows its shibboleths with n+1st-order indexical value.

    | Christine Christie, 2016
2. (Sociolinguistics) Indexical order (Silverstein 2003) is central to the mutability of indexical signs. At some initial stage, a population may become salient, and a distinguishing feature of that population's speech may attract attention. Once recognized, that feature can be extracted from its linguistic surroundings and come, on its own, to index membership in that population. It can then be called up in ideological moves with respect to the population, invoking ways of belonging to, or characteristics or stances associated with, that population.
    Linguistic features of all sorts are continually imbued with a variety of meanings. As a result, indexical order is not linear but can progress simultaneously and over time in multiple directions, laying down a set of related meanings. These meanings at any particular time constitute an indexical field (Eckert 2008)—a constellation of ideologically linked meanings, any region of which can be invoked in context. | Penelope Eckert, 2012

INDEXICALITY
(Semiotics, Linguistics, Anthropology, Philosophy of Language) The phenomenon of a sign pointing to (or indexing) some object in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical. | Wikipedia, 2022

INDIRECT ANAPHORA
(Syntax) A relation between a phrase and some earlier expression which, though not in a strict sense an antecedent, will effectively indicate, in the light of people's general knowledge, who or what it refers to. I.e., a NP can indirectly refer to an entity that has already been mentioned, e.g., I went into an old house last night. The roof was leaking badly and ... indicates that the roof is associated with an old house, which was mentioned in the previous sentence. I.e., the term indirect anaphor refers to a definite NP which has no explicit antecedent in text and is linked via a cognitive process to some element in prior text which functions as some kind of anchor for the interpretation of the IA. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2014

INDIRECT SCALAR IMPLICATURE
(Pragmatics) Indirect scalar implicatures arise from strong scalar terms embedded in downward entailing environments. See the example in (1); other cases include (2) and (3), where the sentences (2a) and (3a) containing the strong scalar terms "all" and "and" give rise to the implicatures in (2b) and (3b).

1. 1. John didn't always go to the movies.
   2. → John sometimes went.
2. 1. Not all of the students went to the movies.
   2. → Some of the students did.
3. 1. John didn't both go to the movies and to the beach.
   2. → John went to one or the other.

INEFFABILITY

1. (Grammar) Ungrammatical structures that cannot be "repaired". The failure of some inputs to find a surface realization has been called "ineffability" (Pesetsky 1997). For instance, in morphology, an input may consist of a set of morphemes, which the grammar combines in some order and some form. For most pairs of nouns and the diminutive suffixes -chen or -lein of German, well-formed results can be computed, as (1a-b) illustrate, but a diminutive is avoided if the resulting phonological structure is not well formed. Though the data are not completely straightforward, the following generalization makes reasonable predictions: No output exists for diminutive formation when the umlauted vowel does not bear main stress (1c-f). Thus, the input {Európa, chen} cannot be mapped onto a grammatical output. It is ineffable (Féry 1994).
   1. Examples of ineffability:
      1. Jahr → Jährchen 'year, dim.'
         Woche → Wöchlein 'week, dim.'
      2. Bruder → Brüderchen 'brother, dim.'
         Mauer → Mäuerchen 'wall, dim.'
      3. Mónat → ? Monätchen, ? Monatchen, *Mönatchen, *Mönätchen 'month, dim.'
      4. Európa → ? Europächen, ? Europachen, *Euröpächen 'Europe, dim.'
      5. Wérmuth → ? Wermüthchen, ? Wermuthchen 'Vermouth, dim.'
      6. Wódka → ? Wodkächen, ? Wodkachen, *Wödkachen, *Wödkächen 'vodka, dim.'
    | Gisbert Fanselow and Caroline Féry, 2002
2. (Syntax) Or, absolute ungrammaticality. Patterns of ungrammaticality are language-dependent, and so are the repair strategies. In other cases, ungrammaticality cannot be repaired within the same construction because the grammar of a particular language does not provide a better alternative via a minor structural repair. This is known as "absolute ungrammaticality" or "ineffability".
    A well-known case is that of multiple wh-questions in some languages (another is passive in Hungarian and other languages). Compare single wh-questions in (1) with multiple questions in (2). Both types of wh-questions are subject to requirements on the position and argumental status of wh-phrases. In English single wh-questions, the wh-phrase must appear in clause-initial position, regardless of its argumental status. In multiple wh-questions there is a Superiority effect whereby the highest available wh-phrase on the argument-adjunct scale (who > what > where > when > how > why) must appear in clause-initial position; the other wh-phrase must remain in situ (its d-structure position). Multiple wh-questions like (2a) have a multiple-pair interpretation. Adequate answers are of the form: John ate pizza, Mary ice cream, etc.
   1. English:
      1. Who came?
      2. What did John eat?
      3. Why did John come?
   2. English:
      1. Who ate what?
      2. *What did who eat?
    Ineffability arises in English when who is paired with adjunct wh-phrases why or how, regardless of which wh-phrase is fronted (3a-b). In other languages requiring wh-fronting in single wh-questions, including Italian (4a) for some speakers (Calabrese 1984), multiple wh-questions are all ungrammatical, regardless of the position or argumental status of the wh-phrases involved.
   3. English:
      1. *Who came why?
      2. *Why did who come?
   4. Italian:
      1. *Chi ha mangiato che cosa?
         Who has eaten which thing?
         'Who ate what?'
    | Géraldine Legendre, 2010

INESSIVE CASE
(Morphology) Inessive case (abbreviated INE; from Latin inesse 'to be in or at') is a locative grammatical case. This case carries the basic meaning of 'in': for example, 'in the house' is "talo.ssa" in Finnish, "maja.s" in Estonian, "куд.са" (kud.sa) in Moksha, "etxea.n" in Basque, "nam.e" in Lithuanian, "sāt.ā" in Latgalian and "ház.ban" in Hungarian. | Wikipedia, 2015

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