Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
Inf-Ins

INFINITIVUS PRO PARTICIPIO
(Syntax) '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:

| Andrew Hoffman and Mike Putnam, 2022

INFL
(Syntax) Name for the verbal inflection of a clause in Government and Binding theory. | A Concise Dictionary of Linguistics, 2003

INFLECTIONAL PHRASE (IP)
(Syntax) Abbreviated "IP" or "InflP". In X-bar theory and other grammatical theories that incorporate it, an inflectional phrase or inflection 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 reflects an analysis whereby a sentence can be treated as having a head, complement and specifier, like other kinds of phrases. | Wikipedia, 2015

INFORMATION STRUCTURE

  1. (Information Structure) The term "information structure" (IS) goes back to Halliday (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 etc. Related notions include Chafe's (1974) 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. | ?
  2. (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 (1-3), a question creates a particular attentional state, which is recognized by the focus in the answer, expressed by pitch accent on tiger (cf. 2). Pitch accent on road, as in (3), would lead to an infelicitous answer, even though the truth conditions of (2) and (3) are the same, as it does not fit to the context question. (Small caps indicate stress).
    1. {What did you see on the road?}
    2. We saw a TIGER on the road.
    3. #We saw a tiger on the ROAD.
     | Caroline Féry and Manfred Krifka, 2008

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/certain. 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. | Paola Catenaccio, 2009

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 illformedness of (1,2):

  1. *John's belief [ Mary's/of Mary to be a spy ]
  2. *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:

  1. vu-cluster
    1. vú-ó̥nū̥
      carry-mouth.IC3
      'fast'
    2. vù-ívù
      get.fat-fat.IC
      'be fat'
  2. tu̥-cluster
    1. tú̥-l'ányá
      hit-at.eye.IC
      'be surprised'
    2. tú̥-ò̥mú̥
      hit-palmfrond.IC
      'summon'
  3. ku̥-cluster
    1. kú-ílú
      be bitter-bitter.IC
      'be bitter'
    2. kú̥-égō
      make-money.IC
      'make money'
  4. ma-cluster
    1. má-ḿmā
      be beautiful.IC
      'be beautiful'
    2. má-ḿkpūrú
      tie cloth (on body).IC
      'tie cloth'
 | Ogbonna Anyanwu, 2012

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 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, 2018

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:
  1. 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 pI that is consistent with cgi or there is no pI that is consistent with cgi.
  2. Because they are non-inquisitive both assertions and RhQs may go unanswered.
  3. 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.
  4. 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):

  1. Janine ate the custard with a spoon.
  2. Wanda accidentally drew on her shirt with a marker.
  3. Renée applied the lipstick with her fingertips.
  4. Carlos carried the milk in a bucket.
  5. Anita went to Amsterdam by train.
  6. The cue ball hit the red ball which sunk the eight ball.
  7. Tyrell used the steamy room to practice yoga.
  8. The bomb blast destroyed the abandoned factory.
  9. The program completed the algorithm in five seconds.
 | Lilia Rissman and Asifa Majid, 2019

 

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