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.
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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Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- “I was embroidering the towel with a sincere hand and praying to God for fate and godsend”: hybrid beliefs presented on Ukrainian rushnyks
- Pragmatic characteristics of diminutive adjectives in Kazakh and English languages
- Anthroponyms: the lexico-semantic approach to word formation and its social and cultural implications
- Unveiling humour in digital discourse: the pragmatic functions of humorous stickers in Spanish WhatsApp chat groups
- Gender stereotype: the features of development and functioning in the Kazakh language
- Cognitive foundations of the formation of communicative competencies in the theory of dialogue
- Family(jiārénmen) is not a family: a study on the construction of pragmatic identities in the generalization of Internet address term “jiārénmen”
- On the social meanings of avoiding fully-articulated explicatures and the role of pragmatics in utterance explication
- The issues of developing the historical subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Kazakh Language
- Corrigendum
- Corrigendum to: Translation of Perso-Arabic loanwords from Hindi into Polish: a pilot study
- Book Review
- Rod Ellis, Carsten Roever, Natsuko Shintani & Yan Zhu: Measuring Second Language Pragmatic Competence: A Psycholinguistic Perspective