Defining discourse

[randall henry eggert]

I would like to offer a different definition of utterance than the one
given by B McComiskey.

On Mon, 25 Jan 1999, Bruce McComiskey wrote:
> "Utterances"--(maybe someone else can explain this better than I
> can!)--"Utterances" are the rhetorical choices we make within the
> linguistic potentialities presented to us by institutionalized rules.

In linguistic pragmatics, utterance is contrasted with sentence and
proposition.  A proposition is ususally seen as a semantic entity, i.e. it
represents logical or denotational meaning. A sentence is defined
morphosyntactically (I won't attempt a definition).  Thus, sentences are
the units that Chomskyan linguists typically  enjoy marking as
ungrammatical/grammatical (marked with a * or the absence of one).  An
utterance, on the other hand, is a pragmatic entity.  It is a unit of
speech that occurs within a given context. (It may be useful to think of
it in terms of use/mention, whereby a sentence, when it is used, is an
utterance.) In Gricean terms, we could say of an utterance that it has
non-natural meaning, but we could not say so of a sentence or a
proposition.  Likewise, speech act theory deals with utterances.  My sense
is that there is no structural definition of utterance within pragmatics,
which is to say that an utterance does not have a one to one
correspondence to sentence; an utterance may be as short as a word (or
a sound or gesture?) or as long as, well... who knows?  Hankamer and Sag
(19??) demonstrate that an utterance need not even be limited to one
person's turn, but may span two person's turns.  On the other hand, Chafe
(1994) seems to have avoided 'utterance' in favor of 'Intonatioal Unit',
which can be defined according to the intonational contour of a given
stretch of speech.

Happiness,
Randy Eggert

p.s. Sorry I couldn't remember the citation for Hankamer and Sag.  I'll
look it up if anybody so desires.