What does "expressive" mean?

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

What is a synonym for "expressive"?

Common synonyms include: alive, allegorical, allusive, angelophanic, appearing, associational.

Pronounced //ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv//.

//ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv// adj, noun

adj, noun ·Moderate ·High school level

Noun

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

Adjective

1
Effectively conveying thought or feeling.
"expressive dancing"
2
Conveying the speaker's emotions and/or attitudes, in addition to the denotative or literal meaning.
"These adults performed significantly more poorly than a group of 28 control adults on all measures of articulation and expressive and receptive language."
3
Able to represent a number of ideas or concepts.
"A programming language that is Turing complete is more expressive than one that is not."

Adjective

1
characterized by expression wordnet
2
performing gestures or possessing qualities or features that suggest a certain state of being or emotion wordnet