A posteriori

IMPERSONAL VERB: A verb without a real subject--see "impersonal verb construction," below.

IMPERSONAL VERB CONSTRUCTION: A verb used without a subject or with a largely non-referential "it" as the subject. For instance, "It is raining."

IMPLIED AUDIENCE: The "you" a writer or poet refers to or implies when creating a dramatic monologue. This implied audience might be (but is not necessarily) the reader of the poem, or it might be the vague outline or suggestion of an extra character who is not described or detailed explicitly in the text itself. Instead, the reader gradually learns who the speaker addresses by garnering clues from the words of the speaker. For instance, Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" and Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" raise some intriguing questions. To whom are these speakers confessing their murders? Likewise, Browning's "My Last Duchess" contains an implied audience who appears to be a messenger or diplomat sent to make marriage arrangements between the poem's speaker and some unknown young girl. From context, the speaker is taking this messenger on a tour of his castle and showing off portraits and paintings. Likewise, in T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the speaker begins by saying, "Let us go then, you and I . . ." The "you" might be the actual reader of the poem, or it might be an implied audience (some unknown dinner companion) accompanying Prufrock, or it might be that the implied audience is the speaker himself; i.e., Prufrock is talking to himself, trying to build up his courage to make a declaration of love. Contrast with audience and ideal reader. This term is often used interchangeably with internal audience.

IMPRIMATUR (Latin, "let it be printed"): An official license or official permission to print or publish a book or pamphlet. In particular, the term refers to a license issued by a censor of the Roman Catholic Church. Such a license is also called a "nihil obstat," ("let nothing stand in the way"), a phrase which often constituted the opening words of such a document. Scholars often use the term loosely to refer to any official blessing to an author that originates from a government, institution, or (in the case of biographies) surviving family members.

I-MUTATION: Also called initial mutation, an i-mutation is a change to the initial sound of a word in response to other words appearing in the sentenc. This is a common feature of Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh in which words change not only their ending sounds (such as the singular Irish for "coat," cóta, becoming the plural Irish cótai) but also their beginning sounds, such as Irish mo chóta. Typically, such mutations heppen when a preceding word requires the change. In Irish, mo ("my") causes a change called lenition, so mo + cóta becomes mo chóta ("my coat"). A closely relataed phenomenon is the i-umlaut, the raising of a vowel by assimilation to an [i] sound in the next syllable. This is commonm in Germanic languages. For instance, in Old English, the prehistoric word *socyan probably became Anglo-Saxon secan because of i-mutation. See also lenition.

IN MEDIAS RES (Latin: "In the middle[s] of things"): The classical tradition of opening an epic not in the chronological point at which the sequence of events would start, but rather at the midway point of the story. Later on in the narrative, the hero will recount verbally to others what events took place earlier. Usually in medias res is a technique used to heighten dramatic tension or to create a sense of mystery. This term is the opposite of the phrase ab ovo, when a story begins in the beginning and then proceeds in a strictly chronological manner without using the characters' dialogue, flashbacks, or memories. (Contrast with flashback, in which the past events are experienced as a memory, and anastrophe, in which the entire story is cut into chronological pieces and experienced in a seemingly random or inverted pattern.)

INCORPORATIVE: In most languages, different grammatical components reflect different parts of speech. For instance, verbs and direct objects are distinct words in most languages, and thus they require two separate grammatical components. However, in an incorporative language, these common sentence elements are combined into a single word. For instance, the incorporative languages may lack independently functioning verbs and independently functioning direct objects, but use a single type of word that fulfill both functions simultaneously. (Instead of saying "I kicked rocks," with three words, the incorporative language might use a single verb/object "kickrocks" and accordingly must use a completely different verb/object to reflect other kicking situations.)

In now outdated linguistic classification, incorporative languages were thought to be more "advanced" than isolating or agglutinative languages but less "advanced" than inflected languages like Latin (Algeo 58). The Eskimo tongue commonly known as West Greenlandic is an example of an incorporative language.

INCUBUS: See discussion under succubus.

INDARBA (Old Irish, "banishment"): A traditional motif of banishment or exile in Celtic literature in which the hero is (often unjustly) exiled from his homeland or tribe or falsely imprisoned.

INDEX: In common parlance, an index is a collection of topics, names, or chapter subjects arranged by alphabetical order in the back of a book. Each entry lists behind it the page numbers where that topic, name, or chapter subject can be found within the body of the text. In historical parlance, the term The Index refers to the Inquisition's list of banned works and authors, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The Catholic Church issued these bans to repress or silence heretical, obscene or "unchristian" materials, preventing their open publication through the 1500s. See also censorship.

INDO-EUROPEAN: The hypothetically reconstructed language that was the ancient ancestor of most European, Middle-Eastern, and Indian languages, including English. Some scholars prefer to use the noun-term proto-Indo-European to refer to this hypothetical language and use the adjective Indo-European in reference to those languages that descend from proto-Indo-European. Click here for extended information.