Wiktionary

expressive

English

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Etymology

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From Middle French expressif.

Pronunciation

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  • IPA(key): /ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/
  • (US) IPA(key): /ɛkˈspɹɛsɪv/
    • Audio (US):(file)
  • Rhymes: -ɛsɪv
  • Hyphenation: ex‧pres‧sive

Adjective

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expressive (comparative more expressive, superlative most expressive)

  1. Effectively conveying thought or feeling.
    expressive dancing
  2. (linguistics) Conveying the speaker's emotions and/or attitudes, in addition to the denotative or literal meaning.
    • 2008, Louise Cummings, Clinical Linguistics, page 270:
      These adults performed significantly more poorly than a group of 28 control adults on all measures of articulation and expressive and receptive language.
    • 2019, Daniel Gutzmann, The Grammar of Expressivity:
      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.

Antonyms

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Derived terms

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Translations

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Noun

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expressive (plural expressives)

  1. (linguistics) Any word or phrase that expresses (that the speaker, writer, or signer has) a certain attitude toward or information about the referent.
    • 2017, Tammi Leann Stout, An investigation of projection and temporal reference in Kaqchikel (dissertation for the University of Texas at Austin):
      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. (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.
    • 2004, Nicole Kruspe, A Grammar of Semelai, →ISBN, page 396:
      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.
    • 2007, N. J. Enfield, A Grammar of Lao, →ISBN, page 299:
      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.
    • 2015, The Munda Languages, Gregory D. S. Anderson, →ISBN, page 139:
      The term 'expressive' was suggested by Diffloth (1976:263–264) and adopted by Emeneau (1980:7) in the South Asian context in the following:
      ‘(E)xpressive’ is the most inclusive term for a form class with semantic symbolism and distinct morphosyntactic properties; ‘ideophones’ are a subclass in which the symbolism is phonological; ‘onomaptoetics’ are ideophones in which the reference of the symbolism is acoustic (i.e. imitative of sounds). Since the ideophones may have reference not only to sounds, but to any other objects of sense, including internal feelings as well as external perceptions (sight, taste, smell, etc.), and since the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian items already examined have this very wide type of reference, the broadest term ‘expressives’ seems appropriate.
    • 2017, Sam Gray, Classifications of Mundari Expressives and Other Reduplicated Structures (thesis):
      I examine the valency of expressives, a class of ideophones in Mundari, comparing their behaviors as predicates to those of reduplicated verb forms.
    Synonym: (or hypernym, or hyponym) sound-symbolic

Usage notes

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For spoken languages, the distinction between expressiveness, imitative harmony and sound symbolism is often unclear (if recognized at all), but “expressive” as a hyponym of “sound-symbolic” may convey an element of emotional reaction for a sound that is not necessarily imitative; for example ah!, hey! or ow!. In sign languages, nearly all signs tend to be expressive, depicting what they represent in a non-arbitrary way.

Further reading

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French

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Pronunciation

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Adjective

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expressive

  1. feminine singular of expressif

German

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Pronunciation

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Adjective

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expressive

  1. inflection of expressiv:
    1. strong/mixed nominative/accusative feminine singular
    2. strong nominative/accusative plural
    3. weak nominative all-gender singular
    4. weak accusative feminine/neuter singular
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