English

Adverb

discursively ‎(comparative more discursively, superlative most discursively)

1. In a discursive manner.
   • 1848, Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem, New York: Putnam, p. 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, George Orwell, Burmese Days, Chapter 8,

     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, 1986, p. 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, 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.