Adjective
Explanatory; serving to explain logically or in detail.
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- Related words
- Examples
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The witness was explicative in telling the police what he saw.
Noun
An explicative term or expression.
- Examples
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More examples (3)
For the adverſative particle [but] which follows, when he ſaith, but he emptied himſelf requires this: Otherwiſe it will not be ſo much an adverſative as an explicative, and will be taken improperly, ſed, pro, veruntamen, but for, nevertheleſs: which leads us to the conſideration of verſe 7.
Here we can explain an event by referring to something that happened long before or long after. This is the case with 19, where the tense of the explicative clauses are overtly realized and refer to points much earlier in the narrative. Thus explicatives do not necessarily serve the evaluative function of bringing several actions together.
As becomes clear from this example, prohibitives and normatives can be more easily located in a text than explicatives. This is because explicatives are often implicit; they depend on a text’s overall meaning and force, relying on what are often hidden presuppositions that have to be provided by the reader.
An expletive.
Usage- nonstandard
- Examples
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Norfolk may yet win its battle against deletable explicatives.
More examples (3)
Even if the reader is amused by the notion of Rembrandt rearranging a Cezanne to suit himself, he is unlikely to find Rembrandt’s pet explicatives – “Holy Hollandaise!” and “Great Gouda!” – anything more than feeble.
Nacho, one of the sentries standing in the aisle north of the Sounders’ fan section, worked the first Portland-Seattle match here back in May, and beyond some yelled explicatives and raised middle fingers, said he never worried about those leading to anything more extreme.
Akiem Hicks is a very large man, with arms thicker than my torso. So when he said he was hurling “explicatives” at Vikings running back Dalvin Cook after annihilating him for no gain in the first quarter Sunday afternoon, I wasn’t about to correct him.