Definition An UTTERANCE is any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence, i.e. two the part of that person.
An utterance is the USE by a particular speaker, on a particular occasion of a piece of language, such as sequence of sentences of sentences, or a single phrase, or even a single word.
Utterance may consist of a single word, a single phrase or a single sentence. They may also consist of sequence of sentence. It is not unusual to find utterances that consist of one or more grammatically incomplete sentence-fragments. In short, there is no simple relation of correspondence between utterances and sentences.
Comment Utterances are physical events. Events are ephemeral. Utterances die on the wind. Linguistics deals with spoken language and we will have a lot to say about utterances in this book. But we will concentrate even more on another notion, that of sentences.
Definition (partial) A SENTENCE is neither a physical event nor a physical object. It is conceived abstractly a string of words put together by the grammatical rules of a language. A sentence can be thought of as the IDEAL string of words behind various realizations in utterances and inscriptions.
Rule We have defined a sentence as a string of words. A given sentence always consists of the same words, and in the same order. Any change in the words or in their order makes a different sentence for our purposes.
Comment It would make sense to say that an utterance was in a particular accent (i.e. a particular way of pronouncing words). However, it would not make strict sense to say that a sentence was in a particular accent, because a sentence itself is only associated with phonetic characteristics such as accent and voice quality through a speaker’s act of uttering it. Accent and voice quality belong strictly to the utterance, not to the sentence uttered.
Comment Not all utterances are actually tokens of sentences, but sometimes only of parts of sentences, e.g. phrases or single words.
Definition (partial) A SENTENCE is a grammatically complete string of words expressing a complete thought.
Comment This very traditional definition is unfortunately vague, but it is hard to arrive at a better one for our purposes. It is intended to exclude any string of words that does not have a verb in it, as well as other string. The idea is best shown by examples.
Comment Utterances of non-sentences, e.g. short phrases, or single words, are used by people in communication all the time. People do not converse wholly in (tokens of) well formed sentences. But the abstract idea of a sentence is the basis for understanding even those expressions which are not sentences. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the meanings of non-sentences can best be analyzed by considering them to be abbreviations, or incomplete versions, of whole sentences.
Definition A proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs.
Comment The state of affairs typically involves persons or things referred to by expressions in the sentence and the situation or action they are involved in. In uttering a declarative sentence a speaker typically asserts a proposition.
Comment In our definition of ‘proposition’ we explicitly mentioned declarative sentences, but propositions are clearly in the meanings of other types of sentences, such as interrogatives, which are used to ask questions, and imperatives, which are used to convey orders. Normally, when a speaker utters a simple declarative sentence, he commits himself to the truth of the corresponding proposition: i.e. he asserts the proposition. By uttering a simple interrogative or imperative, a speaker can mention a particular proposition, without asserting its truth.
Comment We shall have a lot to say in later units about utterances, sentences and propositions, since these concepts are at the bottom of all talk about meaning. We shall see that we have to be very careful, when talking about meaning, to make it clear whether we are dealing with utterances or sentences. To this end we shall try summarizing the relationship between these notions.
We shall use the term of ‘proposition’, ‘sentence’, and ‘utterance’ inn such a way that anything that can be said of propositions can also be said of sentences can also be said of utterances, but not necessarily vice versa. We have already seen an example of this when we said it was sensible to talk of sentence being in a particular language, and also sensible top talk of an utterance being in a particular language, although one cannot talk of proposition being in a particular language.
A proposition is an abstraction that can be grasped by the mind of an individual person. In this sense, a proposition is an object of thought. Do not equate propositions with thoughts, because thoughts are usually held to be private, personal, mental processes, whereas propositions are public in the sense that the same proposition is accessible to different persons: different individuals can grasp the same proposition. Furthermore, a proposition is not a process, whereas a thought can be seen as process going on in an individual’s mind. Unfortunately, of course the word thought may sometimes be used loosely in a way which includes the notion of a proposition. For the instance, one may say, ‘The same thought came into both our heads at the same time’. In this case, the word thought is being used in a sense quite like that of the word proposition. The relationship between mental processes (e.g. thoughts), abstract semantic entities (e.g. proposition), linguistic entities (e.g. sentences) and action (e.g. utterances) is problematic and complicated, and we will not go into the differences further here.
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