A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

254 invariable
in generative grammar, where in his later work Noam Chomsky sees them
as part of the data which the grammar has to account for. It is important,
in discussion of this topic, to distinguish the intuitive responses of the nativespeaker
from those of the linguist – a distinction which can be easily confused
when linguists are investigating their own language. Linguists’ intuitions
concerning the accuracy or elegance of their analyses are quite different in kind
from those of non-linguists, whose intuitions concern the sameness, difference
and relatedness of meanings.
invariable (adj.) A term sometimes used in the grammatical classification of
words to refer to one of two postulated major word-classes in language,
the other being variable. Invariable or invariant words are said to be those
which are used without any morphological change, e.g. under, but, them.
Variable words, by contrast, inflect, e.g. house/houses, sit/sat ...
invariance (n.) A principle in some approaches to phonology whereby each
phoneme is seen as having a set of defining phonetic features, such that
whenever a phoneme occurs the corresponding features will occur. Along with
the conditions of linearity and biuniqueness, the invariance principle establishes
a view of phonemic analysis which has been criticized by generative
phonologists, as part of a general attack on taxonomic phonemics.
invariant (adj.)
see invariable, invariance
inventory (n.) A term used in linguistics and phonetics to refer to an
unordered listing of the items belonging to a particular level or area of
description in a language; e.g. the listing of the phonemes of English would
constitute that language’s ‘phonemic inventory’.
inversion (n.) A term used in grammatical analysis to refer to the process or
result of syntactic change in which a specific sequence of constituents is
seen as the reverse of another. In English, for example, one of the main ways of
forming questions is by inverting the order of subject and auxiliary, e.g. Is
he going?
IPA
see International Phonetic Association
irrealis /}r}cwpl}s/ (adj.)
see realis
irregular (adj.) A term used in linguistics to refer to a linguistic form which
is an exception to the pattern stated in a rule. For example, verbs such as
took, went, saw, etc., are irregular, because they do not follow the rule which
forms the past tense by adding -ed. grammar is concerned with the discovery
of regular patterns in linguistic data: lists of irregularities are usually avoided,
and handled by incorporating the exceptional information into a dictionary entry.
-ise/-ize In phonetics, a suffix used to identify the place or process of
articulation of a secondary stricture, as in ‘labialize’, ‘velarized’ (see secondary
articulation); an associated process suffix is -isation/-ization. For example,
[t j ] would be described as a ‘palatalized t’. Both dynamic and static interpretations