Explicature

Explicature is a technical term in pragmatics, the branch of linguistics that concerns the meaning given to an utterance by its context.

The hearer bases his decisions on the concept of relevance, which basically says that the resulting interpretation should have many effects on his knowledge and beliefs at a low cost for his speech processing system.

[12] Inferences that aren't logically compelling are defeasible:[14] they can be "defeated" (cancelled) by explicit information without sounding self-contradictory.

Thus Peter could cancel much of the above by continuing the original sentence with "Susan made the birds Chinese style, sweet-sour, but used way too much lime juice for my taste."

This is to distinguish what is explicitly said in a narrow sense, i.e. the literal meaning, from what goes beyond the linguistic material actually present in the sentence.

[18] Relevance theory originally described loose talk, hyperbole, metaphor, and other figures of speech as conveying information solely via implicatures.

[19] Carston noted that the mentioned embedding tests classify metaphors and other figures of speech as explicatures, not implicatures.

To resolve this issue, she has proposed that the meaning of words and phrases is adapted depending on the circumstances of an utterance.