The Problem With 'Implicitness'

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 211):

This brings us to SFL’s more traditional concern with context dependency – focusing on the extent to which a text uses words that point to its sensory environment – to what people can see, hear, touch, taste or feel. We will use the term implicitness to refer to the degree to which texts depend on context in these deictic terms. The contrast in play here is illustrated in the example below (from Ngo et al. 2022a: 1022) which has endophoric deixis (that and it) referring to text that the teacher has just read to the class (marked by the upwards pointing arrows) alongside exophoric deixis (this, this, here, this) pointing to an image the class is working on (marked by curved arrows below).

Exophoric reference of this kind is a long-standing measure of the context dependency of a text, in both sociological and linguistic research (e.g. Hawkins 1977; Martin 1983). The items in bold above are relatively implicit and to fully interpret their meaning you have to know what they are referring to – in this case to a science teacher and her students, who are looking at a model of a cell projected onto a smart board. For texts like this there is a sense in which to fully understand them you had to be there (for the lesson) or have someone explain what was going on (as we have just done). Texts which don’t make exophoric reference of this kind are relatively context independent.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] To be clear, the authors propose 'implicitness' to be a textual perspective on textual meaning. However, the concern here is simply with exophoric demonstrative reference, and 'implicitness' simply means that the identity signalled by a grammatical demonstrative reference item has to be recovered from the environment of the text. That is, 'implicitness' is merely a rebranding of (the amount of) exophoric demonstrative reference at the grammatical stratum of language.

[2] Inexplicably, confusingly, and less iconically, Ngo et al. (2022a: 1022) use Halliday's symbol for exophoric reference as their symbol for endophoric reference, and Halliday's symbol for (cataphoric) endophoric reference as their symbol for exophoric reference. Cf. Halliday (1994: : 317):