Explicature

//ɛkˈsplɪkətʃə// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Something explicitly expressed in an utterance, as opposed to what is implicit. countable, uncountable

    "In relevance theory terms, he must construct a hypothesis about the explicit content of Ally's utterance;that is, he mustrely upon both the words she uses in this utterance and an inferencing process to construct an explicature."

Example

More examples

"In relevance theory terms, he must construct a hypothesis about the explicit content of Ally's utterance;that is, he mustrely upon both the words she uses in this utterance and an inferencing process to construct an explicature."

Etymology

From explicate + -ure, after implicature.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.