discursively

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English

Etymology

From discursive +‎ -ly.

Adverb

discursively (comparative more discursively, superlative most discursively)

  1. In a discursive manner.
    • 1848 March, Edgar A Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem, New York, N.Y.: Geo P 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.