The concepts of explicature, impliciture and the Coserian invariant/variant distinction in Spanish legal utterances

Abstract

This paper addresses the encoding and recovery of an implicit adjectival gender modifier in the statements on political citizenship in most Hispanic American constitutions before female suffrage was instituted. The modifier, which was intended to exclude women, was straightforwardly recovered because citizenship was at the time an exclusive right of men. Eventually, however, linguistic-legal indeterminacy arose when some judges and legislators manipulated a language-system fact, i.e., the dual meaning of masculine gender (marked and unmarked), to argue that the constitutional norm for citizenship included women. The modifier is analyzed in reference to the concepts of explicature and impliciture, which trace the distinction between explicit and implicit content in ways compatible with my analysis. Neither of the two concepts comprehensively accounts for the encoding and recovery of the modifier. The integral linguistic model of Eugenio Coseriu does so.