Posted: Nov 19, 2011 6:33 pm
Zwaarddijk wrote:katja z wrote:The distinction between utterance or statement and enunciation seems to be the closest to what you're asking about. The original terms are "énoncé" and "énonciation" (the distinction comes from French linguistics). Utterance refers to what is said (the linguistic "product" itself), and enunciation refers to the act of producing it (saying or writing it) in a specific situation of communication.
How much relevance is there even ascribed to single sentences out of context taken as utterances these days? "The bird is yellow" in one context has quite a distinct meaning, purpose and function than "The bird is yellow" in another context. Of course, this gets into pragmatics and such - I bet there are syntacticians who would not consider them distinct - such a syntactician is more likely to consider two readings of "fruit flies like bananas", to take a classical example, as distinct.
Well, I think the question is, relevance for what? It's just a tool to separate out different levels of what's going on, linguistically. In particular, it is sometimes useful to distinguish between subject of utterance and subject of enunciation, for instance when analysing instances of irony.