ABSTRACT
The analytic force of the concept of utterance is to place in sharp relief a choice between formal and concrete modes of language study, the former exclusively oriented to linguistic structure, and the latter inclusively oriented to performative context. The great contribution of literary analysis to language studies, related obviously to its aesthetic interest in artefactual compositions, is to explicate the extradiscursive features of written language. Language studies vary between extremely dose, usually technical attention to isolated linguistic data and inclusively contextual comprehension. Given the bewildering variety of approaches to language and discourse developed in literary theory, cognitive science, semiotics, and ethnomethodology, it will be helpful to organize an inventory of methods to take stock of the conceptual resources they offer. A field of discourse is a literary and textual, not an oral, phenomenon.
