Explicature

//ɛkˈsplɪkətʃə//

"Explicature" in a Sentence (2 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.

If the speaker was your flat-mate and you had a habit of borrowing her property without permission, she might be asking you if you'd 'borrowed' the book she owned (explicature) and the utterance might be taken as a demand for its return.

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