Utterances

Abstract

This chapter examines utterances. The unit that Greek grammarians called a logos, and Latin grammarians an oratio, was the largest in a hierarchy. Oratio is here translated by English ‘utterance’. Utterances were literally sounds uttered and as such, they had a physical reality. For Dionysus Thrax, a logos was something put together in prose or conversation that ‘makes clear a self-complete thought’. Thus, an utterance is a sequence of words that meets a criteria of correctness and completeness. ‘Potential utterances’ are sequences which can be uttered. Any other sequence of words is a ‘non-utterance’: either its meaning is not complete or it is contrary to ‘a rule of grammar’. A rule is therefore a constraint on what can form an utterance, and the aim of grammar, or the part of grammar that is now called syntax, is to formulate constraints which comprehensively allow whatever is potentially an utterance and exclude non-utterances.