This paper deals with the role of presuppositions and implicatures in normative texts and in their interpretation. I begin by reconsidering the definitions of presupposition and implicature I have supported in my volume Detto non detto [Said not said] and the claim, raised there, that implicit meaning is normative. I discuss the implications of this claim, arguing that it does not require of the participants to actually work out all of the implicit meaning of the text they receive, but is a necessary condition of the distinction between what is implicitly communicated and what is not said at all, as well as between what is implicitly communicated and what may be psychologically associated by the audience to the received text. In the second part of the paper, explicitation practices and their functions are first exemplified by commenting upon a text from a magazine (the reply by an expert to a reader), and then are applied to texts that have either a normative function or a norm-related topic. In particular, I comment upon a passage from a law proposal of the Italian Parliament about omophoby and transphoby. The explicitation of presuppositions and implicatures is shown to clarify the normative setting with which the text belongs and the normative ontology upon which it is designed to act, contribute to determining the precise legal effects of the text, and enable to detect the intentions and evaluations that inspired it making them liable to criticism.
