Longman Dictionary of

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implicational scaling
impersonal construction n
a type of sentence in which there is no mention of who or what does or
experiences something. Examples include English It’s cold, It’s raining,
and French Ici on parle anglais (literally, “Here one speaks English”)
“English is spoken here”.
implication n
in everyday communication, a great deal of information is implied by the
speaker rather than asserted. For example, if somebody said:
Rita was on time this morning.
it could imply that Rita was usually late.
Often the hearer would understand the implication of the utterance in the
way that the speaker intends (see UTTERANCE MEANING) and give a suitable
response but, of course, there may be misunderstandings and misinterpretations:
A: I’m rather short of cash at the moment.
(meaning: I’d like you to pay for the lunch)
B: Oh, I’m sure they accept credit cards here.
implicational scaling n
a method of showing relationships by means of an implicational table or
scalogram. For example, a group of students learning English may
acquire the rule for using the DEFINITE ARTICLE before the rule for the
INDEFINITE ARTICLE and they may acquire those two rules before the rule
for marking the PLURAL of nouns. This can be shown by investigating their
spoken or written language and presenting the results in a table. The
symbol means 100% correct use of the rule and the symbol means
that the rule is applied sometimes but not at other times (variable use).
student noun plural indefinite article definite article
C
A
D
B
F
E
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