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“Reading between the lines” is a version of the hidden meaning theory in suggesting that we have to look for meanings elsewhere than in the lines of text themselves. At its most skeptical, the phrase “reading between the lines” means that an interpretation has come from nothing at all, from the white space between the lines and therefore has been imposed on the material by the interpreter.

Proponents of these views of analysis are, in effect, committing themselves to the position that everything in life means what it says and says what it means. It is probably safe to assume that most writers try to write what they mean and mean what they say. That is, they try to control the range of possible interpretations that their words could give rise to, but there is always more going on in a piece of writing (as in our everyday conversation) than can easily be pinned down and controlled. It is, in fact, an inherent property of language that it always means more than and thus other than it says.

The best evidence for the presence of implication in language itself (not under it or inserted into the white space) can be found by pondering statements that are rich in implication, for their unstated suggestions. We urge you take the time to work through Try This 3.3 below, an exercise demonstrating that implicit meanings are “really there.”

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Try This 3.3: Inferring Implications from Observations

Each of the statements below is rich in implication. Write a list of as many plausible implications as you can think of for each of the statements. After you have made your list of implications for each item, consider how you arrived at them. You might find it useful to do this exercise along with other people because part of its aim is to reveal the extent to which different people infer the same implications.

The sidewalk is disappearing as a feature of the American residential landscape. [Here are a couple of implications to prime the pump: people don’t walk anywhere anymore; builders lack much sense of social responsibility.]

New house designs are tending increasingly toward open plans in which the kitchen is not separated from the rest of the house.

“Good fences make good neighbors.”—Robert Frost

In the female brain, there are more connections between the right hemisphere (emotions, spatial reasoning) and the left hemisphere (verbal facility). In the male brain, these two hemispheres remain more separate.

In America, an increasing number of juveniles—people under the age of 18—are tried and convicted as adults, rather than as minors, resulting in more minors serving adult sentences for crimes they committed while still in their teens.

Neuroscientists tell us that the frontal cortex of the brain, the part responsible for judgment and especially for impulse control, is not fully developed in humans until roughly the age of 21. What are the implications of this observation relative to observation 5?

Linguists have long commented on the tendency of women’s speech to use rising inflection at the end of statements as if the statements were questions. An actual command form—Be home by midnight!—thus becomes a question instead. What are we to make of the fact that in recent years, younger men (under 30) have begun to end declarative statements and command forms with rising inflections?

Shopping malls and grocery stores rarely have clocks.

List as many plausible implications as you can for this statement (which has been contested by other researchers).

“In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. In this study, Nielsen found that people took in hundreds of pages ‘in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.’ It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored.”

—Mark Bauerlein,