Enunciative

Enunciative is an adjective used to describe things related to enunciation, the act of uttering speech and the perspective from which a proposition is presented. In linguistics and discourse studies, the term designates the functional dimension of an utterance that concerns who speaks, when, where, and from what stance, rather than the propositional content alone.

The term derives from the French concept énonciation, which covers how utterances are produced and situated within a communicative situation. In scholarly work, enunciative analysis focuses on the relation between the utterance and the speaker, as well as the context of production. The word is used to distinguish aspects of speech that encode speaker position from the raw information or content of what is being said.

In practice, researchers discuss enunciative resources—such as deictic markers (this, here), person agreement, tense, mood, modality, and intersubjective stance markers (frankly, honestly, as I say). The study of enunciative features helps separate how something is said from what is said, and how discourse constructs identity, credibility, and alignment with listeners.

Examples of enunciative phenomena include sentences that foreground the speaker's role, like “This is my work,” which foregrounds ownership and authority; or epistemic judgments like “I think it will rain,” which encode the speaker’s certainty or doubt. Deictic expressions such as “here” or “this” also anchor utterances in the immediate discourse context, illustrating the practical import of enunciative considerations.

See also énonciation, discourse analysis, pragmatics, semiotics.