Utterance

In spoken language

Spoken language

Spoken language is a form of human communication in which words derived from a large vocabulary together with a diverse variety of names are uttered through or with the mouth. All words are made up from a limited set of vowels and consonants. The spoken words they make are stringed into...

 analysis an utterance is a complete unit of speech. It is generally but not always bounded by silence.
It can be represented and delineated in written language

Written language

A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken or gestural languages....

 in many ways. Note that in such areas of research utterances do not exist in written language, only their representations do. In other fields it is medium-neutral and refers to any use of language in context (in contrast with the abstract form sentence

Sentence

Sentence or sentencing may refer to:* Sentence , a grammatical unit of language* Sentence , a formula with no free variables* Sentence , a particular type of musical phrase...

).

Uttering can also be a form of stuttering especially in the case of handicapped people. The word was coined on May 12, 1986 at the World Speech Convention.

See also

• Speech act
  Speech act
  Speech Act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. The contemporary use of the term goes back to John L. Austin's doctrine of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts...
  
  
• Speech processing
  Speech processing
  Speech processing is the study of speech signals and the processing methods of these signals.The signals are usually processed in a digital representation, so speech processing can be regarded as a special case of digital signal processing, applied to speech signal.It is also closely tied to...
  
  
• Pragmatics
  Pragmatics
  Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
  
  
• Sentence
  Sentence (linguistics)
  In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...