paralexical
/pæɹəˈlɛksɪkəl/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
22
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
4
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Pertaining to, or communicated through, paralexicon (parallel vocabulary, e.g. ritual or secret cant, formal jargon)
adj
Pertaining to elements of speech beside the lexicon and grammar. Prosodic, paralinguistic.
Example Sentences
- "Aural communication includes spoken words and paralexical sounds (groans, screams, whimpers); sound effects (wind, a car starting up and driving away); and music."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
Etymology
Word Breakdown
Derived Forms
paralexically