Explicature is a technical term in
pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...
, the branch of
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
that concerns the meaning given to an utterance by its
context
Context may refer to:
* Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary
Computing
* Context (computing), the virtual environment required to su ...
. The explicatures of a sentence are what is explicitly said, often supplemented with contextual information. They contrast with
implicature
In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly sayi ...
s, the information that the speaker conveys without actually stating it.
The
truth value
In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values (''true'' or '' false'').
Computing
In some progr ...
of a sentence is determined using its explicature. For example:
Imagine Jim and Raoul are driving across America from New York City to Seattle, Washington. Raoul is driving, and Jim falls asleep. When Jim wakes up, he asks Raoul, "Where are we?" Raoul replies, "We aren't there yet, but we've passed Chicago."
If Jim and Raoul's car is in fact five minutes outside Seattle and Raoul knows this, he may be accused of lying, since "We aren't there yet, but we've passed Chicago" in that context has the implicature "We are not too far past Chicago and still not near Seattle." Technically, however, Raoul's statement was true, because the explicature — ''at the time of utterance, Jim and Raoul had passed Chicago and were not yet there (''supplement:'' in Seattle)'' — was true.
Definition
Explicature was introduced by
Sperber and
Wilson
Wilson may refer to:
People
* Wilson (name)
** List of people with given name Wilson
** List of people with surname Wilson
* Wilson (footballer, 1927–1998), Brazilian manager and defender
* Wilson (footballer, born 1984), full name Wilson Ro ...
as a concept in
relevance theory
Relevance theory is a framework for understanding the interpretation of utterances. It was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and is used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The theory was originally inspired by the work o ...
.
Carston gives a formal definition in accord with their reasoning:
n explicature is anostensively communicated assumption that is inferentially developed from one of the incomplete conceptual representations (logical form
In logic, logical form of a statement is a precisely-specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambiguo ...
s) encoded by the utterance.
Thus, only meanings of an utterance that are ''communicated'' can be explicatures. Information that can be inferred, but was not intended to be inferred by the communicator, is neither an explicature nor an implicature. Conversely, something that is communicated but not believed by the addressee ''is'' an explicature, as the responsibility for explicatures lies with the communicator.
Developing explicatures
The definition also implies that the logical form (intuitively, the literal meaning) of an utterance is incomplete. In order to turn it into a complete
proposition
In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...
that is either true or false, enough context must be known to be able to infer additional information: to
* assign
referent
A referent () is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence ''Mary saw me'', the referent of the word ''Mary'' is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken of, ...
s to
indexical
In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a ''sign'' pointing to (or ''indexing'') some object in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, ...
expressions (such as proper names and
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...
s),
* disambiguate ambiguous expressions,
* "enrich" logical forms containing words and grammatical structures that are
semantic
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
ally or grammatically incomplete (e.g.
genitive construction
In grammar, a genitive construction or genitival construction is a type of grammatical construction used to express a relation between two nouns such as the possession of one by another (e.g. "John's jacket"), or some other type of connection ( ...
s, the degree adverb "too", or
ellipses).
For example, if Peter says "Susan told me that her kiwis were too sour", the hearer has to determine which Susan he is referring to, whether "her" refers to Susan, whether "kiwis" means
the fruit or
the birds, in what relation the kiwis stand to her, and by what standard they were too sour. The hearer bases his decisions on the concept of ''relevance'', which basically says that the resulting interpretation should have many effects on his knowledge and beliefs at a low cost for his
speech processing system. So, depending on the context, the first explicature of the utterance might be one of the following:
: (1a) Peter has said that Susan told him that the kiwifruit she, Susan, ate were too sour for her taste.
: (1b) Peter has said that Susan told him that the kiwifruit she, Susan, grew were too sour for the judges at the fruit grower’s contest.
Let us assume it follows from context that (1a) is the correct explicature. Now if Peter is speaking literally (as opposed to, say,
ironically), the utterance also communicates
: (2) Peter believes that Susan told him that the kiwifruit she ate were too sour for her taste.
If Peter has reason to think that his utterance will convince the hearer, it further communicates
: (3) Susan told Peter that the kiwifruit she ate were too sour for her taste.
This is called the ''basic explicature'' of the utterance, while (1a), (1b) and (2) are ''higher-level explicatures''.
Explicature (2) communicates a
propositional attitude
A propositional attitude is a mental state held by an agent toward a proposition.
Linguistically, propositional attitudes are denoted by a verb (e.g. "believed") governing an embedded "that" clause, for example, 'Sally believed that she had won ...
of the speaker, namely that he believes the proposition expressed by the utterance. Additional attitudes can be expressed by further higher-level explicatures,
for example
: (4a) Peter is annoyed that Susan told him that the kiwifruit she ate were too sour for her taste.
: (4b) Peter is bewildered that Susan told him that the kiwifruit she ate were too sour for her taste.
or, if the statement is ironic,
: (5) It is ridiculous to say that Susan told Peter that the kiwifruit she ate were too sour for her taste.
The speaker can give the addressee various linguistic cues to indicate propositional attitudes, such as
grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement of ...
, and
paralinguistic
Paralanguage, also known as vocalics, is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. It is sometimes defined as relatin ...
cues, such as tone of voice. Often such cues do not determine the attitude, and the addressee again has to take the context into account.
Regarding grammatical mood, the first higher-level explicature of an
imperative utterance is "The speaker is telling the hearer to …". Depending on other cues and context, further explicatures could be "The speaker is ordering the hearer to …", "It is moderately desirable to the speaker that …", or "It would be desirable to the ''hearer'' that …", as in this example:
: (6) A: Could you tell me the way to the station?
:: B: Turn right at the traffic lights and keep straight on. (explicature: It would be desirable to A to turn right at the traffic lights and keep straight on.)
The first higher-level explicature of a
question
A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammar, grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are inte ...
is "The speaker is asking whether/what/who …". Neither imperatives nor questions have a basic explicature in the above sense.
Inferences that aren't logically compelling are ''
defeasible'':
they can be "defeated" (cancelled) by explicit information without sounding self-contradictory. Thus Peter could cancel much of the above by continuing the original sentence with "Susan made the birds Chinese style, sweet-sour, but used way too much lime juice for my taste."
Disputed cases
Expansion
![France map modern](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/France_map_modern.png)
Often an utterance that already is a complete proposition needs further expansion to arrive at the proposition the communicator intended to convey. This can involve
* adding missing constituents (This is a difficult task → ''for me / for a schoolchild / for the scientific community''),
* specifying the scope of certain elements such as negators (Everyone isn't hungry → ''Not everyone is hungry'' or ''No one is hungry''),
* strengthening of expressions (This will take time → This will take ''more'' time ''than you might expect''; I have had breakfast → I have had breakfast ''today''; He drank a bottle of vodka and fell into a stupor → He drank a bottle of vodka and ''consequently'' fell into a stupor; Mr Prescott is busy → Mr Prescott is ''so'' busy ''that he cannot see you''),
* weakening of expressions (France is hexagonal → France is ''approximately'' hexagonal; The room was silent → The room was ''nearly'' silent)
There is little consensus which of these, if any, is part of what is explicitly said, i.e. which are explicatures. Carston has argued that an utterance's implicatures cannot entail any of its explicatures; hence, the above should be explicatures.
Another test for explicatures is that they can be embedded in
negations and
if clause
Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is ''con ...
s, which is supposedly impossible for implicatures. However, neither of these tests is generally accepted.
Impliciture
Kent Bach
Kent Bach (born 1943) is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. His primary areas of research include the philosophy of language, linguistics and epistemology. He is the author of three books: ''Exi ...
has argued against viewing enrichment as a form of explicature. He has coined the term ''implic
iture'' to refer to completions of the logical form to a proposition, minus assignment of referents and disambiguation, and also to expansions in the above sense. This is to distinguish what is explicitly said in a narrow sense, i.e. the literal meaning, from what goes beyond the linguistic material actually present in the sentence.
Metaphor and other figures of speech
Relevance theory originally described loose talk,
hyperbole
Hyperbole (; adj. hyperbolic ) is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. In rhetoric, it is also sometimes known as auxesis (literally 'growth'). In poetry and oratory, it emphasizes, evokes strong feelings, and ...
,
metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wit ...
, and other
figures of speech
A figure of speech or rhetorical figure is a word or phrase that intentionally deviates from ordinary language use in order to produce a rhetorical effect. Figures of speech are traditionally classified into '' schemes,'' which vary the ordinary ...
as conveying information solely via implicatures. The argument goes that a metaphorical utterance such as "Your room is a pigsty" ''would'' have the basic explicature "Your room is an enclosure where pigs are kept", but that cannot be an explicature at all because it is certainly not communicated. What is actually communicated, approximately "Your room is very filthy and untidy", must therefore be an implicature.
Carston noted that the mentioned embedding tests classify metaphors and other figures of speech as explicatures, not implicatures. To resolve this issue, she has proposed that the meaning of words and phrases is adapted depending on the circumstances of an utterance.
Thus, "pigsty" acquires the sense "a very filthy and untidy place", so that the meaning of the utterance can be accommodated by an explicature.
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
*
*
Further reading
{{wiktionary
"Explicature and Impliciture"in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Eac ...
Pragmatics
Inference