impliquent

Impliquent is a neologism proposed in some discussions of semantics and pragmatics to refer to the implicit content associated with an utterance—the information that is carried by the form of the expression but not stated explicitly. As an adjective, impliquant describes expressions whose structure encodes implicit commitments, assumptions, or effects; as a noun, an impliquant denotes the implicit content itself that is carried by the utterance.

The term is not widely standardized and appears only in a minority of scholarly discussions. It is typically introduced to distinguish implicit content that is encoded in the utterance (the impliquant) from content that is inferred by listeners (implicature) or assumed as given by presupposition. In this use, the impliquant is considered part of the linguistic meaning or force of an expression, though its downstream interpretations can vary with context.

Relation to related notions is central to how impliquant is described. Implicature refers to reader- or listener-mediated inferences that extend beyond the explicit content; presupposition concerns background assumptions that must be entertained for the utterance to be evaluated; entailment concerns logical consequences of the asserted content. Impliquant sits between these ideas as the encoded implicit content that may trigger implicatures or presuppositions in interpretation.

Applications of the concept are primarily theoretical, within debates on how to decompose meaning into explicit and implicit components. Critics argue that the term risks confusion with established notions, while proponents view it as a useful label for analyzing how certain implicit commitments are linguistically packaged.

See also: implicature, presupposition, entailment, implicant.