A Research On English Communicative Utterance

Utterance,as a unit of analysis in speech,has been defined in various ways but most commonly as a sequence of words within a single person's turn at talk that falls under a single intonation contour.They may sometimes consist of more than one sentence, sometimes stretches of speech shorter than one sentence.As the linguistic communicative unit,the utterance conveys information,expresses thoughts and fulfills the communicative task,which have been studied by the linguists.According to the materials the author has had, the papers about the utterance in English are so limited that they haven't formed the system. The main feature of utterance is the context.Besides,it has other features such as the actual division of the utterance,reference,linear intonation structure and parole implicautre.Any utterance used in communication may bear all the characteristics above,which are interrelated and inseparable each other at the same time.In order to understand the exact meaning of the utterance and communicate successfully,we should consider such restrictive factors as context,modality and body language.By collecting a large amount of cases,the author plans to have a svstematic study about the features and the meaning of the communicative sentence,based on the previous research on it,guided by the theories of the functional grammar,semantics and pragmatics with the route from theory to practice so that we may achieve the best communicative effect and perform the communicative function of rehearsal.Different from the past research,the author plans to adopt the three-way playoff—the explicit meaning,implicit meaning and additional meaning to analyze the literal meaning, implicature of the sentence from the angle of the hearer instead of the traditional two-way level,i.e.the explicit meaning and implicit meaning.In the analysis on the restricting elements for the utterance meaning,in order to enrich the content of this paper,the author takes into account the influence of the body language added to the communication by the speaker besides the factors of the context and the modality of the speaker.