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2. The Scope of Pragmatics
a. Utterance
According to Finnegan 1997: 162, an utterance is the use of a sentence on a particular context. He adds that the utterance is a sentence on a certain
occasion or in a certain context. He also adds that utterance is a sentence that is said, written or signed in certain context by someone with a certain intention, by
means of which the speakers intends to create an effect on the hearer. Utterances become the subject investigation of pragmatics. There is a difference between
utterance and sentence. The meaning of sentence is independent from context. It means that the context does not influence the meaning of the sentence. Otherwise,
the meaning of utterance depends on the context or circumstances of the utterances. Pragmatics pays more attention to the relationship of an utterance to its
context, but it pays less attention to the relationship of word meaning to sentence meaning.
Finnegan sees that the meaning of an utterance includes the descriptive meaning of the sentence, along with social and affective meaning contributed by
contextual factors. He gives example in the following sentence:
I now pronounce you husband and wife
The sentence above may be uttered in at least to different sets of circumstances: 1 By a priest to young couple getting married in the presence of their
assembled families; or 2 By an actor dressed as a priest to two actors assembled in the same church
for the filming of television.
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The first sentence, “I now pronounce you husband and wife” will affect a marriage between the couple intending to get married. But the same utterance
will have no effect on marital status of any party on the movie location. Thus the circumstances of utterance create different meaning.
Finnegan 1997: 345 explains that sentence is a structured string of words that carries a certain meaning while utterance is a sentence that is said,
written or signed in a particular context by someone with a particular intention by means of which the speaker purposes to create an effect on the hearer. Thus, an
interrogative sentence “Can you close the window?” has the meaning of a request for information “Are you able to close the window?”, but as contextualized
utterance it would more often than not to be a request for action “Please, close the window”.
b. Context
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