Expresszív

Expresszív is a linguistic term used to describe elements of language whose primary function is to express the speaker’s attitude, emotion, or stance rather than to convey propositional content. In this sense, expressive items contribute emotive or evaluative meaning to an utterance and often interact with prosody, intonation, and context.

Overview and scope

Expresszív elements can be interjections and exclamatives, as well as non-referential adjectives, adverbs, or discourse particles used to signal emotion, emphasis, doubt, irony, approval, or other affective attitudes. They may be words that do not add to the factual content of a statement but shape the speaker’s stance or the affective force of the utterance. Expressive use can be contrastive with referential or predicative meanings, and it often features non-truth-conditional information.

Relation to linguistic theories

In many frameworks, expressive function is linked to the emotive or affective dimension of language. The Prague School and related functional approaches describe language as having multiple functions, including an expressive (or emotive) function that conveys the speaker’s attitude. Expresszív elements may be realized lexically, morphologically, or prosodically and can vary across languages in their markers and intensity.

Cross-linguistic notes

Expressive devices are common cross-linguistically, though their realization differs. Some languages rely on dedicated particles or clitics; others use intonation, interjections, or evaluative adjectives to achieve the expressive effect.

See also

Emotive language, affective linguistics, interjection, evaluative semantics, functional sentence perspective.