Explicature

The assumptions (propositional forms) communicated by a speaker fall into two classes: explicature and implicature. Sperber & Wilson (1986a, 182)’s original definition of explicitness is as follows: ‘An assumption communicated by an utterance U is explicit

[hence an ‘explicature’] if and only if it is a development of a logical form encoded by U .’ The definition of implicitness, then,is that an assumption communicated by U which is not explicit is im plicit [hence an ‘implicature’].

Let’s concentrate on the concept of ‘explicature’ for the moment. There are two points to note here. Clearly the content of explicatures comes from two distinct sources, the linguistic expressions used and the context, and is derived in two distinct ways, semantic decoding and pragmatic inference. Different token explicatures having the same propositional content may vary with regard to the relative contributions made by decoding and inference. That is, they may vary in degree of explicitness:

(21) a. Mary Jones put the book by Chomsky on the table in the downstairs sitting-room.

b. Mary put the book on the table. c. She put it there.

d. On the table.

All of these could be used in different contexts to communicate explicitly one and the same propositional form. Clearly (21c) and (2 Id) leave a great deal more to pragmatic inference than does (21b), which in turn is less explicit than (21a). Given the essential nature of the underdeterminacy thesis, as argued in the previous chapter, no linguistic expression will achieve full explicitness; that is, will fully encode the propositional form communicated. W hat we really have here are two different explicit/implicit distinctions: one which is the explicature/implicature distinction and another which is, in effect, identical to our semantics/pragmatics distinction. This second distinction on which explicit = encoded and implicit = inferred, has been argued within relevance theory to be the basis of a theory o f style; it concerns the choices a speaker makes about where a hearer/reader needs strong direction and where he can be left to make his own (inferential) choices (see Sperber & Wilson 1986, 202-224; Blakemore 1989a). As I understand it, the latter is a somewhat informal use of explicit/implicit (though widely used in other pragmatics frameworks), and it is redundant, as it merely restates the encoded/inferred distinction. I shall reserve the terms ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ for the explicature/implicature distinction from here on.

The second point is that the explicature/implicature distinction applies only to

communicated assumptions, by which Sperber & W ilson (1986a/95) mean those which the speaker has made it evident she intends the hearer to pick up (see ‘communicative

intention’ and ‘ostensive inferential communication’ in appendix 1). An utterance will, of course, transmit much information that does not fall under this definition of communication, some falling under other types of intentions the speaker may have, some lying right outside any intentions she may have (see Wilson & Sperber (1993a)). This opens up the possibility of a difference between the proposition expressed by the speaker and her explicature(s): the proposition expressed may or may not be communicated; only when it is communicated is it an explicature of the utterance. This distinction is essential to the standard relevance-theoretic account of non-literalness, taken up in section 3.3.4.

Levinson (1987b, 723) raises an apparent problem for the definition of explicature; he says that in distinguishing explicature from implicature the criterion offered by Sperber & W ilson is ‘that explicatures must contain the encoded SR (semantic representation) or LF (logical form) as a proper subpart’. The problem with this is that many clear cases of implicatures meet that condition, and he gives the following example:

(22) A: If Thatcher has won the election, she’ll have won three times. B: Thatcher has won.

Implicature: Thatcher has won three times.

He is clearly right that B has implicated that Thatcher has won three times and that a proper subpart of this implicature is ‘Thatcher has w on’. However, he has missed the crucial concept of ‘developm ent’ in the definition of explicature. This implicature is not derived by a process of pragmatically developing the decoded content of B ’s utterance; plainly, it is derived purely inferentially, by a straightforward deductive inference, one of whose premises is the assumption which IS derived by development of the encoded content, ‘Thatcher has won the election’. The ‘criterion’ provided by the definition of explicature is a derivational one, which is stronger than the one assumed by Levinson: explicatures do, inevitably, contain the SR as a proper subpart but not every com municated assumption that happens to contain as a subpart a constituent which matches the SR is an explicature.

pragmatic processes, which can be loosely called cases of enrichment, that are required in the recovery of the proposition the speaker intended to express, that is, the explicature, if she communicated it. An early discussion of this phenomenon appears in W ilson & Sperber (1981), written at the time they were developing their ideas about relevance. They look at the example in (23); processing the utterance in (23a) progresses to (23b) once the two basic processes o f disambiguation and reference assignment have taken place:

(23) a. John plays well.

b. John Murray plays some musical instrument well. c. John Murray plays the violin well.

However, as they go on to say, in most instances a hearer would interpret (23a) as expressing something more specific than (23b), say (23c), in circumstances of John Murray playing the violin in front of the speaker and hearer. They note a couple of important features of (23c): it entails (hence is more informative than) (23b) and it is on the basis of (23c) rather than (23b) that the implicatures of the utterance would be worked out. I subsequently took up these points in an attempt to clarify the distinction between the concept of a pragmatically imbued proposition expressed or explicature and

b

conversational implicatures (Carston 1985a, 1988, 1993, 1 9 9 ^ . Like Levinson, I was concerned to clarify when a pragmatically determined element of utterance meaning is to be taken as part of an explicature (that is, as a development of the decoded content) and when it is an implicature. Given the (correct) derivational understanding of the concept of a development of logical form, the issue becomes one of how far the development process goes and what constraints there are on it. Some of this discussion is reviewed in section 3.6.

So far I’ve considered only the explicature that an utterance has when the proposition the utterance expresses is communicated (endorsed) by the speaker, but in fact Sperber & W ilson’s idea is that utterances typically have several explicatures. The logical form may be embedded in a range of different sorts of higher-level descriptions, including (weak) speech-act^^ and propositional-attitude descriptions (Wilson & Sperber 1993a, 5-6). For instance, M ary’s reply to Bill’s question in (24b) might have the

explicatures given in (25):

(24) a. Bill: Did your son visit you at the weekend? b. M ary (happily): He did.

(25) a. M ary’s son visited her at the weekend.

b. M ary says that her son visited her at the weekend. c. M ary believes that her son visited her at the weekend. d. M ary is happy that her son visited her at the weekend.

The hearer may actually represent only some subset of these (though the speaker has made manifest her intention to make the others manifest as well). In a situation in which, for instance, Bill knows that Mary has been worrying about a growing rift between her son and herself, he may represent just (25a) (the base-level, we could say, explicature) and the higher-level explicature (25d). These are the explicitly communicated assumptions most likely to give rise to contextual effects (that is, to be relevant). In some other case, the higher-level explicature describing the speaker’s belief^'^ might be the major contributor to the relevance o f the utterance; for instance, in a context in which this representation could overturn or modify the hearer’s existing representation of the speaker’s beliefs. The importance o f higher-level explicatures (in which the proposition expressed is embedded) is most apparent when we look at cases of non-literalness (as we will in section 3.3.4), on the one hand, and at cases of non­ declarative utterances, on the other.

On the relevance-theoretic account, an utterance of a sentence in the imperative mood communicates an explicature which describes a certain state of affairs as desirable to some degree (to either speaker or hearer, an indeterminacy which has to be pragmatically resolved) and as achievable (or, in W ilson & Sperber (1988a)’s more technical terminology, ‘potential’). For example, in an appropriate context an utterance of (26a) could communicate the higher-level explicatures in (26b) and (26c):

(26) a. Buy some milk.

milk.

c. The speaker requests the hearer to buy some milk.

As on certain speech-act accounts, the idea here is that the proposition expressed is the same as that expressed by the corresponding declarative; here it would be ‘the hearer buy(s) some milk’. This is clearly not an explicature o f the imperative utterance, however; what is explicitly communicated by the utterance of (26a) is the higher-level representations. (See Wilson & Sperber (1988a), W ilson (1991), Clark (1991), Clark (1993a) for fully motivated accounts of this analysis o f imperatives.)

The distinction between higher-level explicatures and the explicated propositional form of the utterance is interesting from another point o f view too. Several classes of sentential adverbial have been analysed by theorists as not being part of the propositional form of the utterance:

(27) a. Frankly, I ’m unimpressed.

b. Confidentially, she w on’t pass the exam. c. Happily, M ary’s son visited her this weekend. d. Unfortunately, I missed the train.

e. Obviously, I ’m going to miss the deadline. f. Perhaps, w e’re too late.

‘Frankly’ and ‘seriously’ are cases of illocutionary adverbials; ‘happily’ and ‘unfortunately’ are cases of attitudinal adverbials and ‘obviously’ and ‘perhaps’ are evidential adverbials. It seems that the propositional form (and hence the truth conditional-content) of these utterances does not include the contribution made by the initial a d v e r b ia l.W h e re , then, do these elements make their contribution? Obviously, they each decode into a mentally represented concept'^ which m ust feature in some representation derived by the hearer. There is a nice answer to this in the system Sperber & Wilson have developed: they contribute to a higher level explicature. This is most easily seen in the case of the illocutionary adverbials, which slot straightforwardly into the role of modifier of a speech-act verb in the higher-level speech-act description:

(28) a. I tell you frankly that I’m unimpressed.

b. I inform you confidentially that she w on’t pass the exam.

Evidentials comment on what the speaker sees as the degree of evidential support for the proposition expressed, which may in turn affect the degree of conviction she represents herself as having in the truth of the proposition expressed (that is, the propositional attitude explicature):^^

(29) a. It is obvious (obviously true) that the speaker is going to miss the deadline.

b. The speaker strongly believes that she is going to miss the deadline. c. It is possible that the speaker and X are too late [ f o r ...].

d. The speaker weakly believes that she and X are too late [for ...].

And, in similar vein, for the attitudinal adverbials:

(30) a. It is a happy eventuality [for X] that M ary’s son visited her this weekend, b. It is unfortunate that the speaker missed the train.

b ’. The speaker considers it unfortunate that she missed the train.

There is probably a range of indeterminacies to be resolved here: ‘obvious to whom?’ ‘happy for whom?, ‘unfortunate in whose opinion?’ etc.

So far so (relatively) good, but this brings us to a problem with the definition of explicature as given above. Let’s look at some more complex cases involving sentence adverbials:

(31) a. Kim shouldn’t pass the course, because she frankly hasn’t done the work. b. Kim might pass the course, although, confidentially, she hasn’t done the

work.

c. She has missed a lot of lectures and she, obviously, hates linguistics.

but in (31a) and (31b) here they are modifying an embedded clause, which is surely a constituent of the logical form of the utterance, and hence of the propositional form into which it is developed. Either we are wrong about the role o f these adverbials or the propositional constituents into which the subordinate clauses are developed must be explicatures in their own right. I shall pursue the second option here.

W hat these examples seem to indicate is that the definition of explicature given above is too restrictive, a point noted by Sperber & W ilson (1995, 182, footnote a), in the second edition of their text. They say the definition must be modified to accommodate cases like the following, where P (disembedded) can be an explicature:

(32) a. I tell you that P. b. P despite Q.

Again, these are communicated assumptions which are embedded within an explicature derived by developing the logical form of the utterance in accordance with the criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance. So how should the definition be modified? There are two possibilities that occur to me. One would involve taking the existing definition as one disjunct, and adding another which allows for the extraction or detachment of certain constituent propositions. The other would be to make no change to the definition itself but rather to reject an assumption that underlies its application: the assumption that all utterances have but a single logical form. Instead we could allow that various clausal (sentential) elements of an utterance have a logical form, so that decoding a linguistic string may give rise to several logical forms. Disjunctive definitions are intrinsically unappealing (apparently conceding the non- unitary nature of the phenomenon they are defining), and there seems to be no obvious reason to maintain that an utterance has only one logical form. So I will opt for the second alternative. As a first shot, let’s suppose that an utterance has as many logical forms as the linguistic string uttered has S’ (CP) nodes.^® So the example (31a), repeated here for convenience, has the logical forms given in (33):

(33) a. Kim shouldn’t pass the course. b. She hasn’t done the work.

c. Kim shouldn’t pass the course, because she hasn’t done the work.

Then each of these can give rise to a range of potential explicatures: (34) for the logical form in (33a), (35) for the logical form in (33b), with the contribution of ‘frankly’ coming in here, and (36) for the logical form in (33c):

(34) a. Kim shouldn’t pass the course.

b. S believes Kim shouldn’t pass the course. c. S is saying that Kim shouldn’t pass the course.

(35) a. Kim hasn’t done the work.

b. S believes that Kim hasn’t done the work.

c. S is telling H frankly that Kim hasn’t done the work.

(36) a. Kim shouldn’t pass the course because she hasn’t done the work.

b. S believes that Kim shouldn’t pass the course because she hasn’t done -fK< work.

c. S is saying that Kim shouldn’t pass the course because she hasn’t done the work.

d. S is sad that Kim shouldn’t pass the course because she hasn’t done the work.

W hile these may be communicated (that is, the speaker’s intention to make them m anifest to the hearer is itself made mutually manifest), this is not to say that the hearer will represent all of them; it is almost certain that he will not. The speaker is likely to represent (35c) because the use of ‘frankly’ in this utterance makes it highly manifest and so, given the principle of relevance, likely to have cognitive effects.

It might look as if we are dealing here with entailments o f the maximal logical form but, although some of these lower-level (as we might call them) explicatures are entailments, the phenomenon cannot be generally characterised in this way. The

proposition expressed has entailments that cannot be explicatures, and it has subparts which can be explicatures but are not entailments. Cases of the first type are given in (37)-(38) and of the second in (39)-(40):

(37) a. (Apparently) Robin is a bachelor, b. Robin is a man.

(38) a. (Unfortunately) I bought some pork, b. I bought some meat.

(39) a. I tell you that he is (obviously) lying, b. He is lying.

(40) a. I believe that Mary will (unfortunately) be there, b. M ary will be there.

Intuitively, the entailments in (37b) and (38b) are not explicated, and this is the prediction of the definition of explicature, whether we assume a single logical form for an utterance or the modification suggested above which allows for several logical forms per utterance. On the other hand, the non-entailments in (39b) and (40b), can be explicated; intuitions that this is right are backed up by the way we understand the role of the sentence adverbials in these cases, as modifying the embedded clause:

(41) a. S believes that it is obvious that he is lying. b. S says it is unfortunate that Mary will be there.

It seems that only those entailments which are "visible" in the linguistic form are candidates for explicaturehood and there may be an interesting complementarity with those that can be implicated, a point touched on again in the next section, on implicature. The main point here, though, is that it turns out that the definition of explicature needs no change; the definition works fine once we drop the assumption that an utterance has only that logical form which is the semantic representation of the

highest CP node.