Utterances

An utterance is a unit of spoken or written language produced by a speaker within a specific context. In linguistics, it refers to the actual use of language in real-time, as opposed to a sentence, which is an abstract grammatical form that could be uttered in principle. An utterance includes the speaker, the time and place, and the social or situational context, and may contain disfluencies, repairs, and prosodic features such as intonation and stress.

In philosophy of language, utterances are central to speech act theory. Many utterances are performances that do things in saying them, not merely conveying information. Performatives such as "I apologize," "I promise," or "I christen this ship" enact actions by their very being spoken, given appropriate authority and context. By contrast, statements that describe states or facts are often considered constatives, though their success can still depend on context and intention.

In discourse and conversation analysis, utterances are the units of talk that occur in turns and contribute to the development of discourse, with boundaries marked by pauses, intonation, or punctuation in written form. In corpus linguistics, utterances can function as analysis units for syntax, pragmatics, and discourse.

In natural language processing and human–computer interaction, an utterance typically corresponds to a single user input in a dialogue system, often derived from speech recognition and segmentation rules. Understanding utterances involves handling ambiguity, context, and conversational structure.

Examples include simple or complex strings such as "Hello," "Could you help me find a recipe?" or "I’m not sure I understand."