The Journal of Studies in Language ISSN:1225-4770(Print) 2671-6151(Online) 언어연구

The first step of understanding speaker’s utterance is to comprehend what the speaker explicitly said. Just decoding linguistic elements has not been considered enough to understand the explicit meaning of utterances fully. The relevance theoretic term explicature sheds light on the way we interpret the explicit meaning of the speaker. In situations where speakers from different cultures communicate in a common language, deriving explicatures becomes more crucial and challenging. However, explicature is criticized that it appears to be hearer-centered by intercultural pragmatists. This paper aims to stipulate the nature of intermediate level of explicit meaning and then try to broaden the concept of explicature to ensure that hearers consider the speaker’s intersubjectivity and egocentrism in the process of explicature derivation.