Explicit/
Explicitness

Erika Lombart, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium
erika.lombart@uclouvain.be

The term ‘explicit’ is frequently employed in a technical sense, especially within the fields of linguistics and pragmatics. Grice defines the notion of ‘what is said’, a concept especially relevant within the fields of linguistics and pragmatics. This is distinct from ‘what is implied’, which encompasses implicit information that is not directly stated but is instead inferred by the listener through contextual cues and background knowledge. Specifically, Carston posits that explicitness is a semantic matter, directly tied to the linguistic content of an utterance, while implicitness deals with pragmatics, relying on context and shared knowledge for interpretation. Carston further introduces the concept of explicature, a key notion in pragmatics, which refers to an enriched interpretation of an utterance that goes beyond its literal linguistic form but remains part of the explicitly communicated content. This enrichment is achieved through context-dependent inferences that complete or clarify what is directly expressed. Building on this distinction, Sperber and Wilson emphasise that explicitness is not an absolute concept but rather a matter of degree. According to them, the more a linguistic code contributes to the interpretation of an utterance, the higher the degree of explicitness. An explicit utterance, such as ‘The Earth revolves around the Sun’, presents all the necessary information for understanding, without requiring any additional contextual information. By contrast, an utterance like ‘It's getting chilly’ requires the listener to rely on contextual clues to fully grasp its meaning. Depending on the situation, it could imply a desire to close a window, an invitation to move indoors, or simply an observation about the temperature.

Keywords: clues, meaning, information

Related Entries: Implicit, Implicitness, Subjectivity

References:
Carston, R. (1998). Pragmatics and the explicit-implicit distinction [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University College London). [UCL Discovery]. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10100579/1/Pragmatics%20and%20the%20explicit-implicit%20distinction.pdf
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Speech Acts (Vol. 3, p. 41‑58). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368811_003
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Blackwell.