purposive
Part of speech: adj
noun
Morphological type: derivation
Topics: grammar
human-sciences
linguistics
psychology
sciences
Etymology: From purpose + -ive. Compare purpositive.
Base: purpose
Affixes: -ive
Inflected forms:
form: more purposive
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: most purposive
pos: adj
tags: superlative
Senses:
gloss: Serving a particular purpose; useful; adapted to a given purpose, especially through natural evolution.
pos: adj
examples: 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.
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.
gloss: Done or performed with a conscious purpose or intent.
pos: adj
examples: 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.
Other ecclesiastics [...] were similarly accepting of a space for purposive and beneficent human action and betterment in a disenchanted world.
gloss: Pertaining to purpose, as reflected in behaviour or mental activity.
pos: adj
examples: Ursula could not believe the air in her nostrils. It seemed conscious, malevolent, purposive in its intense murderous coldness.
The question at once arises whether medieval thinkers really believed that what we now call inanimate objects were sentient and purposive.
gloss: Pertaining to or demonstrating purpose.
pos: adj
examples: The world was generally agreed to be a purposive one, responsive to the wishes of its Creator […].
gloss: Possessed of a firm purpose.
pos: adj
examples: 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.
gloss: Of a clause or conjunction: expressing purpose.
pos: adj
examples: 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 […]
gloss: A mood indicating a purpose of the course of activity expressed by the verb.
pos: noun
tags: uncountable
examples: This purposive was described by speakers as referring to the action which can be observed at the moment of speech; this is why it is termed ‘visual’.
Related words: purposeful
Derived words: nonpurposive
purposive approach
purposively
purposiveness
purposivism
purposivist
purposivity
unpurposive
Translations:
lang: Czech
word: účelový
lang: Galician
word: intencionado
lang: Galician
word: intencional
lang: Slovak
word: účelový
lang: Spanish
word: intencional