The relationship beerance meaning
• In many situations, utterance meaning is based on sentence meaning, however it contains more than sentence meaning, because utterance meaning is the result of the combination of sentence meaning and context. • In other words, utterance meaning is the realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication, or simply in a context.
• The meaning of an utterance is the meaning of the sentence plus the meanings of the circumstances: the time and place, the people involved, their backgrounds, their relationship to one another, and what they know about one another.
2. Sentence meaning VS. Utterance meaning
• Sentence meaning belongs to semantic area while utterance meaning belongs to pragmatic area. • Sentence meaning is abstract and decontextualized, utterance meaning is concrete and context-dependent.
Sentence meaning VS. Utterance meaning
句子意义和话语意义
1. Sentence VS. Utterance
• Sentence: A sentence is a grammatical concept. It is a group of words which are organized in accordance with established grammatical rules of languages, an abstract structure governed by grammar. • Utterance: An utterance is a unit of communication. It is the smallest unit which has certain communicative functions. This smallest unit of communication can be, in length, exactly the same as a grammatically well formed sentence . For example, " There is a dog at the gate. We'd better keep away", these two grammatically complete sentences can have the communicative value of a " warning" or "suggestion" in cetain context.
3. Example
• "John is still single", as an isolated sentence, at most, it tells us the John's marital status. If we look at it as an utterance, then in certain contexts, besides the sentence meaning, it can also imply other meanings, for example, encourage the listener to date John.
• While most utterances take the form of grammatically complete sentences, some utterances do not, and some cannot even be restored to complete sentences. For example, "Good morning!" and "Hi!" are all utterances, which have meaning in communication.