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.

An 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. In other words, an utterance is a somewhat discrete entity.

Nevertheless, an 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, patterns 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. In particular, they exhibit graded grammaticality.