Utterance


 * Definition, an example, and a metaphor**

While a conventional vernacular definition of "utterance" is simply something said such as a statement, Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle used "utterance" to refer not to just the words spoken, but as a concept that inextricably connects them to the social context in which they are used. As opposed to treating a statement in isolation - a representation of one reality spoken by one person alone -, in Bakhtin's concept, utterances connect to the utterances that came before as well as the anticipated and real utterances that come after.

Taking, for examples, the data set we used for class for our collaborative project, those proposals (utterances) were not written in isolation, but rather in response for a call for papers (another utterance), which anticipated the response by the proposal writers. The proposals, in turn, were responded to with letters of acceptance or rejection; the proposal writers anticipated this kind of a response. The chains of utterances, or speech flow, would continue through multiple utterances, including discussion the acceptance or rejection, writing and perhaps speaking the papers that emerge from the proposals, reactions to those papers, etc. Each of these utterances both responded to and anticipated other utterances, obeying socially internalized "rules" for each context, or speech genre (expressions of dismay are expressed differently in verbal commiserating utterances about a proposal rejection with a friend than they are in a formal proposal expressing dismay over the lack of attention to a certain concept within a field).

Ann Freadman illustrates the way that utterances play off of each other using a metaphor of a tennis game. "A ball is a physical object that becomes meaningful when it is played -- that is, when it becomes a shot. A shot, therefore, is a played ball, in much the same way that an utterance is a played sentence in Bakhtin's formulation" (Bawarshi and Reiff 83). The shots are exchanged between players in the context of a game as utterances are exchanged in social contexts.

In "The Problem of Speech Genres," Bakhtin outlines three factors that are needed to complete a whole utterance: In explaining the first two terms, Bakhtin points out that what we respond to in an utterance is not the actual words that a person uses, but our understanding of the speaker's will; "We imagine to ourselves what the speaker //wishes// to say" (77). This idea is integral to the idea of the utterance as the main component of speech communication as opposed to the actual sentence of words that is spoken. As to the third aspect, Bakhtin explains this idea in depth in his //The Problem of Speech Genres//. In short, all utterances use genres, no matter how creative we perceive our sentences to be. In fact, we learn language in speech genres; according to Bakhtin, "[t]he forms of language and the typical forms of utterances, that is, speech genres, enter our experience and our consciousness together, and in close connection with one another" (78). (related terms: genre, heteroglossia).
 * Three aspects of utterances**
 * 1) semantic exhaustiveness of the theme
 * 2) the speaker's plan or speech will; the subjective aspect of the utterance
 * 3) typical compositional and generic forms of finalization (76-77)

As a speaker constructs an utterance, she not only uses, consciously or unconsciously, speech genres, but in doing so she is anticipating the response of the addressee, whether that addressee is immediately present as in conversation or, say, over the internet in a chat program, but also if the addressee is not immediately present, as in the example of the proposals above, or, perhaps the addressee is not a particular person at all, as in the case of a novel. As Voloshinov states this idea, "utterance, as we know, is constructed between two socially organized persons, and in the absence of a real addressee, an addressee is presupposed in the person, so to speak, of a normal representative of the social group to which the speaker belongs" (58).(related terms: audience and addresivity)

As Phelps summarizes, "[u]tterances are individual, concrete events as well as being intensely charged with ideological and historical voices" (166). As such, utterances are actually ways of being, of situating oneself within those voices of the other.

Bawarshi, Anis S. and Mary Jo Reiff. //Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy//. West Layfayette: IN: Parlor Press, 2010.
 * Sources**

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. "The Problem of Speech Genres." //Speech Genres and Other Late Essays// (trans. Vern W. McGee). Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Eds.). Austin: U of Texas Press, 1986.

Phelps, Louise Weatherbee. "Audience and Authorship." In //A Sense of Audience in Written Communication//. Gesa Kirsch and Duane H. Roen (Eds.). Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1990. 153-174.

Voloshinov, Valentin. "Marxism and the Philosophy of Language." //The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov.// Pam Morris (Ed.). New York: Edward Arnold, 1994.

addressivity and audience, dialogic, genre, heteroglossia, other, speech plan
 * Related terms**