discursively

English

Etymology

From discursive +‎ -ly.

Adverb

discursively (comparative more discursively, superlative most discursively)

1. In a discursive manner.
   • 1848 March, Edgar A[llan] Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem, New York, N.Y.: Geo[rge] P[almer] Putnam, of late firm of “Wiley & Putnam,” […], →OCLC, page 103:

     If then I seem to step somewhat too discursively from point to point of my topic, let me suggest that I do so in the hope of thus the better keeping unbroken that chain of graduated impression by which alone the intellect of Man can expect to encompass the grandeurs of which I speak, and, in their majestic totality, to comprehend them.

   • 1934 October, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter VIII, in Burmese Days, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, →OCLC:

     There were certain things […] that pricked him to talk discursively and incautiously; but now he realized that he had only been talking like a character in a novel, and not a very good novel.

   • 1962, George Steiner, “Homer and the Scholars”, in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman, New York: Atheneum, published 1986, page 176:

     We are dealing in the Iliad with a commanding vision of man, articulate in every detail, not with a tale of adventure automatically or discursively carried forward.

   • 1978, Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage, published 2003, Chapter 2, part II, p. 148:

     In that realm, which was discursively constructed and called the Orient, certain kinds of assertions could be made, all of them possessing the same powerful generality and cultural validity.