utterer

An utterer is the person who performs the act of uttering a linguistic expression in a communication event. In linguistics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, the utterer is the agent responsible for producing a spoken or signed utterance, including its lexical content, intonation, and context of production. The concept helps distinguish the act of saying something from the content that is said (the proposition) and from the person who listens or reads.

The utterer is not always synonymous with the speaker in every analysis, particularly in reported or indirect discourse, where the original utterer may be implied or separated from the act of reporting. The utterer's identity, intention, and time of utterance can affect how indexicals and deictic expressions are interpreted. For example, in direct speech, phrases like "I am tired" refer to the utterer, whereas in "John said that he was tired," the reference shifts with reporting.

In practical analysis, noting the utterer can be important for studies of speech acts, politeness, provenance of statements, and conversational structure. In corpus linguistics, metadata may include an utterer or speaker label to enable variationist studies or authorial analyses.

See also speaker, addressee, discourse, speech act, deictic.