Etymology Borrowed from Middle French cursif, from Medieval Latin cursīvus, from Latin cursus.
1
Running; flowing.
2
Of writing Having successive letters joined together.
Then Mambro handed me his manuscript, a sheaf of loose pages really, his cursive handwriting scrawled over them, the exaggerated tails of the f’s and the j’s, the distinct loop of the q.2025, Santanu Bhattacharya, Deviants, Fig Tree, page 269:
3
Grammar, Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences Of or relating to a grammatical aspect relating to an action that occurs in a straight line (in space or time).
cursive aspect
[…] of the action or state of affairs expressed by the verb to the time of utterance; rather they express how the speaker regards the event: many grammarians distinguish between a constative aspect, in which an occurrence is simply registered as such, as something concluded, and a cursive aspect, in which the action is described in its course. (I need not add that this is an oversimplification, but there is no time for a more detailed account.)1978, The Bible Translator, volume 29, United Bible Societies, page 158:
2 more examples
[…] other hand, by local divergences. The general drift is primarily reflected in the renewal of the prefix conjugation. This renewal is defined as a "renewal of the cursive aspect" according to RUNDGREN (1963, e.g. p. 78), and according to COHEN (1984, e.g. pp. 281, 587), as an innovation of the prefix conjugation as shifting from the basic significance of "inaccompli" to that of "concomitance", allowing for further differentiation of tense and mode. (For a presentation of the appropriate linguistic properties in Semitic within this […] partly to the verbal system (to some degree dependent on Aktionsarten). All dialects make use of auxiliaries and verbal modificators "wenn auch in unterschiedlichen Umfang ... um eine weitere Differenzierung des Tempussystems zu erreichen". Already at this point questions accumulate: what are the actual representations of the cursive aspect / concomitance? Are perfect and imperfect aspect or tense or both, in which case, is one or the other predominant? Where do the Aktionsarten come in? Is the main function of the auxiliaries and modifiers to […] There is a sort of impressionistic consensus which might be summarized thus: The suffix conjugation denotes the perfective action in the past time. The b-imperfect in Syria denotes the durative action mainly in the present time, or the concomitance, or the cursive aspect, in narratives also in the past time; it also distinguishes the indicative from the subjunctive y-imperfect. The function is paralleled by the ka-imperfect in Morocco. The y-imperfect occupies a similar position in the other dialects. There are modifiers […]1995, Dialectologia Arabica: A Collection of Articles in Honour of the Sixtieth Birthday of Professor Heikki Palva [a festschrift], Finnish Oriental Society, pages 66-69:
[quoted text] “[…] future, nor an expression of non completed action, nor an expression of cursive aspect […] yiqtol usually expresses that an action will happen in the future, that it may, should or could happen: these are modal uses.”⁴⁰ Joosten even explains the indicative functions of the yiqtol in a modal […]2004, Albert H. Kamp, Inner Worlds: A Cognitive-Linguistic Approach to the Book of Jonah, Brill Academic Publishers, →ISBN, page 55: