purposive
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈpəːpəsɪv/
ipa: /ˈpɚpəsɪv/
Forms: form: more purposive
form: most purposive
Etymology: From purpose + -ive. Compare purpositive.
Senses: examples: text: Irresistably it came to me again that beauty, far from being wasted, was purposive, that this purpose was of a redeeming kind, and that some one who was pleased co-operated with it for my personal benefit.
ref: 1918, Algernon Blackwood, chapter 9, in The Garden of Survival, London: Macmillan, page 142:
text: As we saw in our discussion of the FAKE GUN example in chapter 19, there are natural dimensions to our categories for objects: […] purposive, based on the uses we can make of an object in a given situation.
ref: 1980, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, chapter 24, in Metaphors We Live By:
glosses: Serving a particular purpose; adapted to a given purpose, especially through natural evolution.
examples: text: It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.
ref: 1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], “Appendix. The Principles of Newspeak.”, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001, page 273:
text: Other ecclesiastics [...] were similarly accepting of a space for purposive and beneficent human action and betterment in a disenchanted world.
ref: 2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 191:
synonyms: word: deliberate
word: intentional
word: purposeful
word: advertent
word: conscious
word: deliberate
word: intentional
word: on purpose
word: purposeful
word: purposive
word: volitational
word: volitional
word: voluntary
word: wilful
glosses: Done or performed with a conscious purpose or intent.
examples: text: Ursula could not believe the air in her nostrils. It seemed conscious, malevolent, purposive in its intense murderous coldness.
ref: 1920 November 9, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, chapter 29, in Women in Love, New York, N.Y.: Privately printed [by Thomas Seltzer] for subscribers only, →OCLC, page 453:
text: The question at once arises whether medieval thinkers really believed that what we now call inanimate objects were sentient and purposive.
ref: 1964, C. S. Lewis, chapter 5, in The Discarded Image, Cambridge University Press, page 93:
topics: human-sciences
psychology
sciences
glosses: Pertaining to purpose, as reflected in behaviour or mental activity.
examples: text: The world was generally agreed to be a purposive one, responsive to the wishes of its Creator […].
ref: 1971, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Folio Society, published 2012, page 78:
glosses: Pertaining to or demonstrating purpose.
examples: text: Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her—the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world.
ref: 1993, Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy, Boston: Little, Brown, Part One, 1.15, p. 45:
synonyms: determined
resolute
glosses: Possessed of a firm purpose.
examples: text: Many scholars suggest that […] the increase in the use of the to-infinitive in Middle English took place at the expense of the bare infinitive (i.e. an infinitive without the marker to). […] due to the loss of verbal inflections, it became difficult to distinguish the infinitival form from other verbal forms. As a result […] to began to function as a mere marker of the infinitive, losing its original ‘purposive’ sense […]
ref: 2004, Olga Fischer et al., chapter 7, in The Syntax of Early English, Cambridge University Press, page 212:
topics: grammar
human-sciences
linguistics
sciences
glosses: Of a clause or conjunction: expressing purpose.
Derived terms: purposive approach
purposively
purposiveness
purposivism
purposivist
purposivity
Related terms: purposeful