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informant
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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See also: Informant
English
Etymology
Pronunciation
Noun
informant (plural informants)
- One who relays confidential information to someone, especially to the police; an informer.
- (linguistics) A native speaker who acts as a linguistic reference for a language being studied. The informant demonstrates native pronunciation, provides grammaticality judgments regarding linguistic well-formedness, and may also explain cultural references and other important contextual information.
- 1977, A. E. Kibrik, The methodology of field investigations in linguistics:
- The only material the linguist has to begin with are the informant's grammatical utterances in the target language pronounced arbitrarily in a natural or assigned communicative situation or stimulated artificially by the investigator.
- 2003, Sergei Nirenburg, H. L. Somers, Yorick Wilks, Readings in machine translation, page 116:
- The informant learns his language by formal training and, more importantly, by constant exposure to its use. He cannot repeat to the linguist what he has never seen or heard.
Synonyms
Derived terms
Translations
one who relays confidential information
|
lingustics: native speaker who acts as a reference
|
See also
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Catalan
Verb
informant
Dutch
Etymology
Borrowed, more probably from French or German than from English due to the word's ultimate stress.
Pronunciation
Noun
informant m (plural informanten, diminutive informantje n)
French
Participle
informant
Further reading
- “informant”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.
Latin
Verb
īnfōrmant
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