expressiveadj/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/

• 1

  Effectively conveying thought or feeling.

  • expressive dancing
  • a gesture expressive of the utmost contempt
• 2

  human-scienceslinguisticssciencesConveying the speaker's emotions and/or attitudes, in addition to the denotative or literal meaning.

  • 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.
• 3

  computingengineeringmathematicsAble to represent a number of ideas or concepts.

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

expressivenoun/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/

• 1

  human-scienceslinguisticssciencesAny 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

  human-scienceslinguisticssciencesA 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.

  • 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.