informant
See also: Informant
English
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.
- 1977, A. E. Kibrik, The methodology of field investigations in linguistics
Synonyms
Translations
one who relays confidential information
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lingustics: native speaker who acts as a reference
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Catalan
Dutch
Etymology
Borrowed, more probably from French or German than from English due to the word's ultimate stress.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ˌɪn.fɔrˈmɑnt/
Audio (file) - Hyphenation: in‧for‧mant
- Rhymes: -ɑnt
French
Latin
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