Expressive

Quick meaning: Expressive is an adjective meaning Effectively conveying thought or feeling.

Meaning

Effectively conveying thought or feeling.

More Meanings

1. (linguistics) Conveying the speaker's emotions and/or attitudes, in addition to the denotative or literal meaning.
2. (programming) Able to represent a number of ideas or concepts.
3. (linguistics) Any word or phrase that expresses (that the speaker, writer, or signer has) a certain attitude toward or information about the referent.
4. (linguistics, more narrowly) 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.

Example Sentences

expressive dancing

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

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

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

Word Forms

• expressives

Synonyms for expressive

Depending on context, synonyms include sound-symbolic, revelatory, communicative, communicatory.

Antonyms for expressive

Common opposites include inexpressive, unexpressive.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include communicatory, revelatory, communicative, indicative, significant, vocal.

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