- 1
An informant is a person who gives information to someone in authority, often secretly - like someone who quietly tells the police about a crime. Researchers also use the word more for a person who is interviewed to give information, like a native speaker who helps a linguist understand a language.
告密者、線人；(研究)受訪提供資訊者
組成inform + -ant (a suffix for 'a person who does something')
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
informantnoun/ɪnˈfɔːmənt/
- 1
One who relays confidential information to someone, especially to the police; an informer.
- One of her chief informants is Alicent’s handmaiden Talya (Alexis Rabin), whose inside info runs so deep that she’s the first to catch wind of Viserys’ death.
- 2
human-scienceslinguisticssciencesA 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.
- 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.
- 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.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。