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On the social meanings of avoiding fully-articulated explicatures and the role of pragmatics in utterance explication

  • Marwan Jarrah EMAIL logo , Sukayna Ali , Yousef Aljabali and Hanan Al-Jabri
Published/Copyright: September 2, 2024

Abstract

The term ‘explicatures’ pertains to the inferential developments made of utterances with the objective of attaining a greater degree of clarity by the speaker (Sperber and Wilson 1986). It was first introduced by relevance theory to provide evidence that the explicit part of communication may contain a pragmatically inferred material, which facilitates communication and makes it more relevant (Carston. 2000. Explicature and semantics. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12. 44–89). Nevertheless, there are instances where explicatures are deliberately not fully articulated in order to achieve certain social meanings as well as communicative goals. This research article examines the social functions, which are accomplished when communicators do not articulate pragmatically inferred material which is part of the explicit content of the utterance. Based on the analysis of genuine communications, obtained from real-life interactions from Jordanian Arabic, this article demonstrates that the act of not fully articulating explicatures serves certain social purposes, such as not inviting evil eye, not damaging the positive face of the addressee or the person under discussion, and avoiding the explicit mentioning of delicate matters like illnesses and social taboos; hence conforming to the established social conventions. Furthermore, the results referred to a remarkable association between particular areas of explicatures identification and certain social functions.


Corresponding author: Marwan Jarrah, Department of English Language and Literature, School of Foreign Languages, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism and suggestions. We would also like to thank the audience at the The 10th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication (INPRA), Pisa, Italy where an early version of this paper was presented. Their discussion of some data and issues mentioned in this article were helpful and stimulating.

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Received: 2024-01-06
Accepted: 2024-08-09
Published Online: 2024-09-02
Published in Print: 2025-05-26

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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