Definition of "holophrastic" []

• Polysynthetic. (adjective)
• Of or relating to the stage of child language development characterized by the use of single-word utterances. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "According to Merriam-Webster, the first definition of "holophrastic" is: using or consisting of a single word that functions as a phrase or sentence."
• "The concern to distinguish the literal and the figurative, the primary meaning and the secondary meaning, came later, for purposes of analysis; and outside this concern there was no literal or figurative meaning, just a holophrastic meaning that covered indifferently both of the meanings we distinguish."
• "Further, as Barfield rightly noted, the literal/figurative distinction is actually a breaking apart of what at least sometimes is an earlier holophrastic meaning -- that is, we have no reason to think that people took pneuma (=wind) as the anchor meaning and then extended the use to pneuma (=spirit); rather, they just used the word pneuma in both ways without bothering about literal and figurative senses."