Expressive

//ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv// adj, noun

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Effectively conveying thought or feeling.

    "expressive dancing"

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

Etymology

Etymology 1

From Middle French expressif.

Etymology 2

From Middle French expressif.

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