utterance

utterance, in the study of language, an instance or token of speech understood to encompass a limited sequence of orally produced sounds exhibiting the phonetic properties and syntactic structures of words, phrases, sentences, or other grammatical constructions of a given language. Such sequences are commonly characterized as “utterances” of the corresponding words, phrases, sentences, and so on.

The term utterance also applies to sound sequences that may not fully correspond to a certain grammatical unit of a given language but that, like instances of ordinary speech, are produced with the intention of communicating information or performing some other illocutionary speech act(s)—e.g., asserting, commanding, promising, questioning, requesting, warning, and so on. For example, given an appropriate context, uttering the English word fire and uttering the English sentence “Your house is on fire” may effect the same speech act—that is, an assertion or warning (that your house is on fire) or a request or command (that you leave your house). Similarly, by uttering a sound like “burr,” again given an appropriate context, one might perform the same speech act as would be effected by utterances of the English sentence “I am cold” (an assertion) or “Close the window” (a request or command).

A traditional definition of utterance identifies particular sound sequences as being immediately preceded or followed by periods of silence or by a change of speaker. The American linguist Zellig S. Harris (1909–92), for example, defined an utterance as “any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of that person.” This understanding of the notion of an utterance is regarded by some scholars as insufficiently specific, because it would apply equally to a single-word assertion (or request or command) and an hours-long speech.