Implicature and Explicature

The explicature/implicature distinction is one manifestation of the distinction between the explicit content of an utterance and its implicit import. On certain ‘minimalist’ approaches, the explicit/implicit distinction is equated with the semantics/pragmatics distinction or with Paul Grice’s saying/implicating distinction. However, the concept of ‘explicature’, which belongs to the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework (RT), has closer affinities with the wider ‘contextualist’ perspective, according to which context-sensitive pragmatic processes make a much greater contribution to the proposition explicitly communicated than merely resolving ambiguities and providing referents for indexicals. Crucially, there are pragmatic processes of meaning enrichment and adjustment which have no linguistic mandate but are wholly motivated by considerations of communicative relevance. Two consequences of this are that (a) explicit utterance content can include constituents which are not articulated in the linguistic form of the utterance, and (b) certain Gricean implicatures are reanalysed as components of the explicitly communicated truth-conditional content. In this chapter, we outline the explicature/implicature distinction and highlight some of the issues it raises for semantic/pragmatic theorizing.