purely verbal

Let us hope that all this remains a purely verbal escalation.

It is purely verbal: at every table for two, there must be at least three opinions.

Hall made a brief reply and a policeman had to step in to ensure the exchange remained purely verbal.

On rare occasions, the observations were purely verbal.

Transitions (the "dissolves") through metaphor and metonymy are all purely verbal.

The strategy statement can take the form of a purely verbal description of the strategic options which have been chosen.

The problem could be a purely verbal assignment, like word association, or a physical task that requires teamwork and ingenuity to solve.

As well as being purely verbal, the pun can be visual, kinetic, gestural.

Then again, she knew she'd never liked any sort of confrontation, whether it was physical or purely verbal, so perhaps she was overreacting.

(Try to give a purely verbal description of the reactions among three mutually catalytic chemicals.)

Irma Prunesqualior had never met such a person, her admirers confining themselves to purely verbal approach.

Classical rhetoric had early singled out the critical category of the superficial charmer, whose merit was purely verbal, without underlying substance.

But Sabbath's disgust at "the laudable ideologies" gives the book a polemical edge that takes things beyond purely verbal playfulness.

The reference, purely verbal, that I often made to God in my speeches before the court awakened mistrust in my clients.

For Jakobson, the emotional qualities of a literary work are secondary to and dependent on purely verbal, linguistic facts" (71).

And when the remembering of an incident has become a habit, it may be purely verbal, and the memory-belief may consist of words alone.

The promise, if promise there was, had been purely verbal, and it was not pretended that there was anything to bind the chancellor in law.

Like verbs, statives can sometimes be inflected for person but normally lack inflections for tense, aspect and other purely verbal categories.

Given that we do want to study children's capacities in a purely verbal medium we therefore need a medium which is essentially verbal but without artificial restrictions.

A gloss meant an explanation of a purely verbal difficulty of the text, to the exclusion of explanations required by doctrinal, ritual, historical, and other obscurities.

J. D. North has succeeded in reconstructing the St Albans escapement from the purely verbal description given in the surviving manuscript.

Barbara Everett of The Independent described the language of the book as "dislocated, dehistoricised, only making meaning if treated as a purely verbal pleasure.

And to say that homosexuals are not giving to the other because the other is not other is to ascend to an even rarer realm of the purely verbal.

It included the accusation that Hobbes used purely verbal tactics, preferring his own semantics of a term such as "air", to cast doubt on the existence of a vacuum.

A man-made environment is as 'natural' as that of the jungle, unless you insist on a purely verbal distinction that divorces 'Man' from the rest of nature.