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discursively

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Etymology

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    From discursive + -ly.

    Adverb

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    discursively (comparative more discursively, superlative most discursively)

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