Reassessing the Explicit-Implicit Distinction: A Critical Analysis of Gricean Pragmatics and Relevance Theory

This paper investigates the problematic nature of the explicit-implicit distinction in the theory of meaning. It reviews how this notion has been addressed in the two major theories of the inferential approach, namely, the Gricean semantics-pragmatics theory and Wilson and Sperber’s Relevance Theory (RT). The representation of meaning in terms of the explicit-implicit distinction is attributed to Gricean semantics-pragmatics, which is operationalised in terms of truth-conditions for the explicit meaning and implicatures for the implicit meaning. Although Gricean proposals have laid the foundations for most of the work in the theory of meaning, the paper highlights that such an explicit-implicit distinction cannot be a clear-cut division and identifies some irregularities in the interplay between Grice’s linguistic meaning and conversational implicatures. The paper then re-analyses Gricean pragmatics in the light of Relevance Theory (RT) and concludes by explaining the salient issues with the clear-cut distinction between explicit and implicit meaning. The study finds that Grice’s view—that the semantics-pragmatics distinction is based on the saying/implicating distinction—does not hold because conversational maxims play a significant role in reference assignment and in determining which of the logically possible senses of what is said the speaker could have intended.