expressive — English Dictionary

Adjective

1. Effectively conveying thought or feeling.

   Examples

   expressive dancing

   a gesture expressive of the utmost contempt

2. Conveying the speaker's emotions and/or attitudes, in addition to the denotative or literal meaning.

   Examples

   These adults performed significantly more poorly than a group of 28 control adults on all measures of articulation and expressive and receptive language.

   More examples (1)

   This volume provides a detailed account of the syntax of expressive language, that is, utterances that express, rather than describe, the emotions and attitudes of the speaker.

3. Able to represent a number of ideas or concepts.

   Examples

   A programming language that is Turing complete is more expressive than one that is not.

Noun

1. Any word or phrase that expresses (that the speaker, writer, or signer has) a certain attitude toward or information about the referent.

   Examples

   More examples (1)

   Consider the case of expressives, where no prior knowledge of the speaker’s attitudes are required to interpret the utterance. In (43) ["That jerk Alexa keeps making me look bad"], Steve does not need to know (and in fact has no prior knowledge of) anything relating to Siri’s attitudes towards Alexa to interpret that Siri has a negative attitude about Alexa. It is the expressive that jerk that implies the negative attitude.

2. A word or phrase, belonging to a distinct word class or having distinct morphosyntactic properties, with semantic symbolism (for example, an onomatopoeia), variously considered either a synonym, a hypernym or a hyponym of ideophone.

   Synonyms

   sound-symbolic

   Examples

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   Cross-linguistically 'expressives' are more commonly termed 'ideophones' [...] Expressives are often cited as a distinctive shared feature of the Austroasiatic language family (Diffloth and Zide 1992; Osada 1992 (Mundari); Svantesson 1983 (Kammu)). [...] I do not make a distinction between expressives and ideophones. [...] I distinguish expressives from onomatopoeic forms, although the two probably overlap.

   A native metalinguistic term toongl-toojl covers most of these, capturing a range of phenomena associated with alliterative, sound symbolic, and poetic expression. This chapter describes expressive structures under the headings ideophones, onomatopoeia, four-syllable rhyming expressions, echo formation, and interjections. 12.1 Ideophones The term ideophone is roughly equivalent to the term expressive, as well as other terms mimetic and psychomime.

   The term 'expressive' was suggested by Diffloth (1976:263–264) and adopted by Emeneau (1980:7) in the South Asian context in the following: ‘(E)xpressive’ is the most inclusive term for a form class with semantic symbolism and distinct morphosyntactic properties; ‘ideophones’ are a subclass in which the symbolism is phonological; ‘onomaptoetics’ are ideophones in which the reference of the symbolism is acoustic (i.e. imitative of sounds). Since the ideophones may have reference not only to sounds, but to any other objects of sense, including internal feelings as well as external perceptions (sight, taste, smell, etc.), and since the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian items already examined have this very wide type of reference, the broadest term ‘expressives’ seems appropriate.

   I examine the valency of expressives, a class of ideophones in Mundari, comparing their behaviors as predicates to those of reduplicated verb forms.

Adjective

1. performing gestures or possessing qualities or features that suggest a certain state of being or emotion

2. characterized by expression

   Examples

   a very expressive face