Expressive

/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/ · adjective

Meaning

Effectively conveying thought or feeling..

Definitions by Sense

1. Effectively conveying thought or feeling.
2. (linguistics) Conveying the speaker's emotions and/or attitudes, in addition to the denotative or literal meaning.
3. (programming) Able to represent a number of ideas or concepts.
4. (linguistics) Any word or phrase that expresses (that the speaker, writer, or signer has) a certain attitude toward or information about the referent.
5. (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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Synonyms for expressive

Antonyms for expressive

Related Words

Word Forms

• more expressive
• most expressive
• expressives

Usage Notes

Choose a synonym only when it preserves the intended meaning, tone, and grammar of the full sentence.

Practice and Learn More

Frequently Asked Questions