Meanings
- not comparablePertaining to, or communicated through, paralexicon (parallel vocabulary, e.g. ritual or secret cant, formal jargon)
- not comparablePertaining to elements of speech beside the lexicon and grammar. Prosodic, paralinguistic.
Aural communication includes spoken words and paralexical sounds (groans, screams, whimpers); sound effects (wind, a car starting up and driving away); and music.
Jon Whitmore (1994) Directing postmodern theater: shaping signification in Performance, p. 14.
3 more examples
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.
David E. Van Zandt (2014) Living in the Children of God, p. 120.
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.
Andrew Taylor (1987) Reading Australian Poetry, p. 74.
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.
Richard Taruskin (1975) Opera and Drama in Russia: The Preachment and Practice of Operatic Esthetics in the Eighteen-sixties, Part 2, pp. 493, 497.
Origin
Cite this entry
paralexical. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/paralexical
“paralexical.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/paralexical. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “paralexical,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/paralexical.
Source: paralexical on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.