a baseline, a normal kind of communication from which any deviation has an emotional impact. In speech, our baseline is the utterance—a burst of language bounded by pauses or interruptions. Sometimes an utterance corresponds to a full sentence; sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time an utterance is a string of words, but sometimes we even cut ourselves off in the middle of one (for examp—). Talking exclusively in complete sentences sounds stilted in all but the most formal of prepared speeches. (Sentence fragments! How useful!) We use utterances in casual writing as well. For people whose
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One year of research and the best explanation of 'utterance' was on my kindle
