Explicitness and implicitness in cognitive linguistics

Underlying the different frameworks of explicit/implicit communication in Anglo- American pragmatics is the distinction between different levels of meaning as laid out in Carston’s version of the underdeterminacy thesis. The intermediate level of what is said as the first propositional or truth-conditional content to be established (followed by possible implicatures) betrays the formal-semantic basis of these approaches and their grounding in the objectivist paradigm of language and meaning (Marmaridou 2000:45-46, see also 3.1.1). In this account, the meaning of what is said/explicature is closely linked to the dictionary meanings of individual words (mind, however, the pragmatic intrusion into what is said as established by current pragmatic theories) and, being truth-conditional/ propositional, what is said exhibits some form of correspondence to some state of affairs in the world. It is against this background that the distinction between explicit communication and implicit communication, as understood by Anglo-American pragmatics, has to be seen. Since actual speaker meanings are both generally much richer than those that can be accounted for by narrow dictionary meanings and also go beyond the simple correspondence to some uninterpreted state of affairs in the world, a division of labour is established between (formal) semantics, which yields part of the input to the meaning of what is said, and pragmatics, which introduces all of the encyclopaedic information that is necessary to arrive at the actual speaker meaning.

It should be clear from the discussions in chapters 3 and 4 that both the philosophical underpinnings and the account of linguistic meaning adopted in cognitive linguistics are different from that of formal semantics and Anglo-American pragmatics. These differences will not be revisited here in detail. What is important to the present discussion is that cognitive linguistics rejects the dichotomy of dictionary/linguistic vs. encyclopaedic/non- linguistic meaning and adopts a fully encyclopaedic account of meaning in which lexical items serve as points of access to this encyclopaedic knowledge (see 4.2.3). In this account, “[t]here is no principled distinction between semantics and pragmatics“ (Evans/Green

2006:215) and, consequently, no principled distinction between the various levels of meaning identified within Anglo-American pragmatics. In the absence of this distinction, there has been considerably less specific theorizing on explicit and implicit communication in the cognitive linguistic framework. According to Fauconnier (1990:391), who introduced the notion of invisible meanings into cognitive linguistics, the distinction between the Gricean enterprise with its explicit-implicit distinction and cognitive linguistics can be phrased as follows:

[...] it is in the very nature of linguistic form to considerably underspecify meaning construction; the search for ‘invisible’ meaning is on from the start: context and prior discourse configurations must be invoked directly before any meaning at all, literal or derived, can emerge.

This view seems more resonant with the view on explicitness and implicitness held in the present study. From this perspective, the linguistic surface structures actually verbalized (or profiled, see 4.5.3.2) in a text would constitute the explicit part of the content to be conveyed, and those contextually licensed aspects of the encyclopaedic information to which these structures provide access28

(a) I want you to put the canned tomatoes on the top shelf of the pantry.

would constitute the implicit content. Langacker (2008:54) discusses an example quite similar to the one used by Carston (see 6.4.1.1) to highlight the difference between explicit and implicit meanings as perceived in cognitive linguistics:

(b) Put the tomatoes on the top shelf of the pantry. (c) Put them on the top shelf.

(d) Tomatoes, top shelf. (e) On the top shelf. (f) On top.

According to Langacker (ibid.), all of the above utterances may be used to convey the same essential content, but they differ in construal because different proportions of this content are explicitly profiled/coded and contextually inferred (so far, this is in line with Carston’s reasoning). Langacker (ibid.) further claims that underlying all communication is a conceptual substrate (see 5.3.4) that largely remains implicit in communication and serves as the basis for contextual inferencing processes. Importantly, and contrary to Anglo-American pragmatics, he does not claim that all of the above utterances convey the

28 _{The locus of this contextually inferable encyclopaedic information would be the discourse participants’}

same explicit content (i.e. the same explicature with varying degrees of explicitness) but rather the same content to be conveyed by the speaker29

However, it must be pointed out that abandoning or disregarding the Anglo-American pragmatic account of explicit and implicit meaning also has several drawbacks. One of the advantages of this account is undoubtedly its very fine-grained theoretical toolset for developing underdetermined linguistic structures into actual speaker meanings

with different degrees of overt/explicit linguistic profiling/encoding and implicit contextual inferencing. This means that, in recognizing that some (essential or directly conveyed) content can be conveyed with varying degrees of explicitness, we should also acknowledge that this content is then conveyed with varying degrees of implicitness. This is the view on explicitness and implicitness (in their microscopic version) that will be followed in the present thesis. From this perspective, the linguistic surface structures actually verbalized or profiled in a text would constitute the explicit part of the content to be conveyed and the contextually inferable aspects of the encyclopaedic information to which these structures provide access would constitute the implicit part.

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