Implicit

Anna Bączkowska, University of Gdansk, Poland
anna.baczkowska@ug.edu.pl

Implicit language is non-literal, usually based on presupposition and/or implicature, and is cancellable. By cancellability we mean the option of withdrawing from what the speaker has said without negative consequences. The fact that one can deny what s/he said is particularly important in offensive language, and especially in the case of irony. In order to avoid being judged for criticising and/or ridiculing the receiver in case the latter reacts stronger to the offensive language than expected, the speaker can renounce his/her negative intentions as the way s/he expressed thoughts were not straightforward and left some room for doubt whether the speaker actually meant what s/he said or not. Traditionally, implicitness encompasses figurative language, such as: metaphors, similes, understatements, overstatements, irony. They stem from Grice’s typology of implicitness that comprises: irony, metaphor, hyperbole, and meiosis. Sometimes non-figurative language, which however is not fully literal such as rhetorical questions, are also included in implicitness, in particular examples of the Searlian indirect speech act (such as Can you pass me the salt wherein a question is in fact a request).

Keywords: non-literalness, cancellability

Related Entries: Implicitness, Implicit Bias, Explicit/Explicitness

References:
Bączkowska, A. (2023). Implicit offensiveness from linguistic and computational perspectives: A study of irony and sarcasm. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 19(2), 353-383. https://doi.org/10.1515/lpp-2023-0018
Bączkowska, A., Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B., Žitnik, S., Liebeskind, C., Trojszczak, M., & Valunaite
Oleskeviciene, G. (2024). Implicit offensive language taxonomy. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 20(2), 463-483. https://doi.org/10.1515/lpp-2024-0049
Grice, H. P. (1989). Logic and conversation. In Herbert Paul Grice studies in the way of words (pp. 22–40). Harvard University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1979). Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511609213