Utterance
In oral/spoken language, utterances have several characteristics such as paralinguistic features, which are aspects of speech such as facial expression, gesture, and posture.
Prosodic features include stress, intonation, and tone of voice, as well as ellipsis, which are words that the listener inserts in spoken language to fill gaps.
For example, a semantic field of love can be created with lexical choices such as adore, admire, and care.
These include paralinguistic features which are forms of communication that do not involve words but are added around an utterance to give meaning.
Examples of paralinguistic features include facial expressions, laughter, eye contact, and gestures.
Ellipsis can be used in either written or spoken language; for instance, when an utterance is conveyed and the speaker omits words because they are already understood in the situation.
Fillers usually give the speaker time to think and gather their thoughts in order to continue their utterance; these include lexis such as, "like", "and stuff",[4] Accent/dialect is also a characteristic included in utterances which is the way the words are voiced, the pronunciation and the different types of lexis used in different parts of the world.
It has been shown that children whose parents received more education and have higher SES have larger vocabularies and learn new words more quickly during early childhood while children with less educated parents and lower SES have a smaller vocabulary and a slower growth in their vocabulary skills (Arriaga, Fenson, Cronan & Pethick, 1998; Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, Laursen & Tardif, 2002; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991; Lawrence & Shipley, 1996; Ninio, 1980).
For instance, high-SES mothers use longer utterances and a wider variety of words when talking to their children.
The lexis and semantics differ, and a speaker uses words suited for children, "doggie" instead of "dog", for example.
According to Bakhtin, sentences do not indicate a change of speech subject, and thus do not automatically satisfy one of the four properties of utterances.
