Utterance

In spoken language analysis, an utterance is a continuous piece of speech, by one person, before or after which there is silence on the part of the person.^[1] In the case of oral languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded by silence. Utterances do not exist in written language; only their representations do. They can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways.

In oral/spoken language, utterances have several characteristics such as paralinguistic features, which are aspects of speech such as facial expression, gesture, and posture. Prosodic features include stress, intonation, and tone of voice, as well as ellipsis, which are words that the listener inserts in spoken language to fill gaps. Moreover, other aspects of utterances found in spoken languages are non-fluency features including: voiced/un-voiced pauses (i.e. "umm"), tag questions, and false starts, or when someone begins uttering again to correct themselves. Other features include fillers (i.e. "and stuff"), accent/dialect, deictic expressions (utterances such as "over there!" that need further explanation to be understood), simple conjunctions ("and", "but", etc.), and colloquial lexis (everyday informal words).^[2]

Utterances that are portrayed in writing are planned, unlike utterances in improvised spoken language. In written language there are frameworks that are used to portray this type of language. Discourse structure (which can also be found in spoken language) is how the conversation is organized, in which adjacency pairs - an utterance and the answer to that utterance - are used. Discourse markers are used to organize conversation ("first", "secondly", etc.). Lexis denotes the words being used in a text or spoken; these words can create a semantic field. For example, a semantic field of love can be created with lexical choices such as adore, admire, and care.