A usage event
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
CP109
2025-12-08
42
A usage event
Perhaps the most important concept underlying usage-based approaches to linguistics is the usage event. A usage event is an utterance. Consider the following two definitions of the term ‘utterance’ provided by two of the leading proponents of the usage-based approach:
[An utterance is] a particular, actual occurrence of the product of human behavior in communicative interaction (i.e., a string of sounds), as it is pronounced, grammatically structured, and semantically and pragmatically interpreted in its context. (Croft 2001: 26)
An utterance is a linguistic act in which one person expresses towards another, within a single intonation contour, a relatively coherent communicative intention in a communicative context. (Tomasello 2000: 63)
As these statements indicate, an utterance is a situated instance of language use which is culturally and contextually embedded and represents an instance of linguistic behaviour on the part of a language user. A language user is a member of a particular linguistic community who, in speaking (and, indeed, in signing or writing), attempts to achieve a particular interactional goal or set of goals using particular linguistic and non-linguistic strategies. Interactional goals include attempts to elicit information or action on the part of the hearer, to provide information, to establish interpersonal rapport (e.g. when ‘passing the time of day’) and so on. The linguistic strategies employed to achieve these goals might include the use of speech acts (requesting, informing, promising, thanking and so on), choices over words and grammatical constructions, into nation structures, choices over conforming or not conforming to discourse conventions like turn-taking and so on. Non-linguistic strategies include facial expressions, gesture, orientation of the speaker, proximity of interlocutors in terms of interpersonal space and so on.
As we will define it, a usage event or utterance has a unit-like status in that it represents the expression of a coherent idea, making (at least partial) use of the conventions of the language (the ‘norms’ of linguistic behaviour in a particular linguistic community). In other words, an utterance is a somewhat discrete entity. However, we use the expressions ‘unit like’ and ‘somewhat discrete’ because the utterance is not an absolutely discrete or precisely identifiable unit. This is because utterances involve grammatical forms (for example, word order), semantic structures (patterns of meaning), speech sounds, pat terns of intonation (for example, pitch contours), slight pauses, and accelerations and decelerations. While these properties converge on discreteness and unity, they do not co-occur in fixed patterns, and therefore do not provide a set of criteria for collectively identifying an utterance. In this respect, utterances differ from the related notion of sentence.
A sentence, as defined by linguistics, is an abstract entity. In other words, it is an idealisation that has determinate properties, often stated in terms of grammatical structure. For example, one definition of (an English) sentence might consist of the formula in (1):
In this formula, ‘S’ stands for sentence, ‘NP’ for subject noun phrase, and ‘VP’, for the verb phrase or predicate which provides information about the subject NP. We will look more closely at this idea in Part III of the book (Chapter 14).
The notion of a sentence, while based on prototypical patterns found in utterances, is not the same as an utterance. Utterances typically occur spontaneously, and often do not conform to the grammaticality requirements of a well-formed sentence (recall the discussion of grammaticality in Chapter 1). For example, in terms of structure, an utterance may consist of a single word (Hi!), a phrase (No way!), an incomplete sentence (Did you put the . . .?) or a sentence that contains errors of pronunciation or grammar because the speaker is tired, distracted or excited, and so on. While much of formal linguistics has been concerned with modelling the properties of language that enable us to produce grammatically well-formed sentences, utterances often exhibit graded grammaticality (an idea that is discussed in more detail in Chapter 14). This fact is widely recognised by linguists of all theoretical persuasions. As this discussion indicates, while a sentence can be precisely and narrowly defined, an utterance cannot. While sentences represent the structure associated with a prototypical utterance, utterances represent specific and unique instances of language use. Once a sentence is given meaning, context and phonetic realisation, it becomes a (spoken) utterance. Typically, cognitive linguists place little emphasis on the sentence as a theoretical entity. In contrast, the notion of a usage event or utterance is central to the cognitive perspective.
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