paralexical

Adjective

 * 1) Pertaining to, or communicated through, paralexicon (parallel vocabulary, e.g. ritual or secret cant, formal jargon)
 * 2) Pertaining to elements of speech beside the lexicon and grammar. Prosodic, paralinguistic.
 * 3) * "en"

- Aural communication includes spoken words and paralexical sounds (groans, screams, whimpers); sound effects (wind, a car starting up and driving away); and music.


 * 1) * "en"

- The actual reading of the text itself is accompanied by certain common paralexical and extratextual features. The paralexical features are the intonational contours and stress patterns given the oral reading.


 * 1) * "en"

- But the conventional nature of rhyme and metre, their essential arbitrariness, points to the fact that they themselves are also signifiers, albeit paralexical and to some extent parasyntactic.


 * 1) * "en"

- Gervinus speaks here not of literal music, but of those paralexical attributes of speech that often convey more emotion than words — intonation, pitch-level, volume, tempo, etc. Mussorgsky clearly desired to reduce the formal lexical content of the play to a bare minimum, leaving the greater room for paralexical play, that is, the "musical" qualities of speech.

Derived terms

 * paralexically

Related terms

 * paralexicon
 * paralinguistic