Explicature and Impliciture in Pragmatic Inference
When someone speaks, the meaning you recover isn't just what the words literally encode. You also fill in gaps, resolve ambiguities, and read between the lines. Explicature and impliciture are two theoretical tools that describe how this works. Explicature captures the explicitly communicated content (after pragmatic enrichment), while impliciture captures what's communicated implicitly. Together, they explain how hearers move from a string of words to a full understanding of what the speaker meant.
Explicature and impliciture definitions
Explicature is the proposition a hearer recovers by taking the sentence's logical form and developing it into something fully truth-evaluable. This development isn't pure decoding; it requires pragmatic work like assigning referents, disambiguating words, and narrowing or broadening concepts. The result is still considered explicit content because it's a fleshed-out version of what was linguistically encoded.
For example, if someone says "She handed him the key and he opened the door," the explicature includes figuring out who "she" and "he" refer to, and understanding that the events happened in sequence (even though "and" doesn't strictly encode temporal order).
Impliciture is a term introduced by Kent Bach to describe implicit content that is closely tied to what is said but not fully articulated. Unlike Gricean implicature, which is a separate proposition altogether, impliciture involves completing or expanding the proposition the speaker expressed. The hearer derives it through pragmatic inference based on context, the speaker's intentions, and shared knowledge.
For instance, if someone says "I haven't eaten," the impliciture is something like "I haven't eaten today" or "I haven't eaten dinner yet." The speaker didn't say the temporal restriction out loud, but it's part of the communicated content.
A useful way to keep them apart: explicature develops what is linguistically given into a full proposition. Impliciture fills in what isn't linguistically given but is still part of what the speaker meant to communicate.
Explicature vs. impliciture examples
Example 1: "It's cold in here."
- Explicature: The temperature in the room where the speaker currently is falls below what the speaker considers comfortable. (Reference assignment: "here" = this room. Concept adjustment: "cold" = uncomfortably cold for the speaker.)
- Impliciture: The speaker wants the hearer to do something about it, such as close a window or turn up the heat. This goes beyond the stated proposition but is closely tied to it.
Example 2: "I have a deadline tomorrow."
- Explicature: The speaker has a task or project due the following day. (Reference assignment: "I" = the speaker; "tomorrow" = the day after the utterance.)
- Impliciture: The speaker is declining an invitation or signaling unavailability. The temporal pressure of the deadline communicates this without the speaker saying it outright.
Notice that in both cases, the impliciture depends heavily on the conversational situation. The same sentence in a different context could carry a different impliciture or none at all.
Identification of pragmatic inferences
Steps to identify explicatures:
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Identify the linguistic expressions in the utterance (words, phrases, syntactic structure).
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Determine the logical form those expressions encode (the bare semantic meaning before any pragmatic enrichment).
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Enrich that logical form through pragmatic processes:
- Reference assignment ("he" → John, "there" → the library)
- Disambiguation ("bank" → financial institution vs. riverbank)
- Saturation (filling in unarticulated constituents required by the grammar, e.g., "ready" → ready for what?)
- Free enrichment (narrowing or broadening concepts, e.g., "drink" → drink alcohol)
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The result is a fully propositional explicature that can be evaluated as true or false.
Steps to identify implicitures:
- Start from the explicature you've already derived.
- Consider the conversational context: the setting, the relationship between speakers, what's been said before.
- Identify what the speaker likely intends to communicate beyond the explicature, drawing on shared knowledge and goals.
- Formulate the impliciture as a completion or expansion of what was said (e.g., adding a temporal or locative restriction the speaker left unstated).
Role in utterance interpretation
Explicature and impliciture work together to convey the full meaning of an utterance. The explicature provides the propositional foundation, and the impliciture builds on it to communicate content the speaker chose not to spell out. Both are necessary for successful communication; relying on the logical form alone would leave you with an incomplete, often unevaluable representation.
The hearer's role in this process is active. You don't passively receive meaning. You decode the linguistic signal, develop it into an explicature using contextual clues, and then draw further inferences to recover implicitures. This all happens rapidly and often unconsciously.
Context is what makes impliciture possible. Factors like the relationship between speaker and hearer (friends vs. strangers), shared experiences, cultural norms around politeness and directness, and the goals of the conversation all shape what implicitures a hearer will derive. The same utterance, "I haven't eaten," could be an impliciture for "Let's get food" in one context and "That's why I feel dizzy" in another. Without context, there's no reliable way to pin down the impliciture.