Definition of "expressive" in English

adjective

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.

3. (programming) Able to represent a number of ideas or concepts.

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

noun

1. (linguistics) 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. (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.

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