HERE in Iran I have been finding it hard to make sense of all the strident utterances about the Islamic Republic emanating from America's capital this week.
The naughty swearies have been beeped out but the utterances are just about identifiable – so much so that you can play a game of 'Malcolm Tucker Bingo' by trying to recognise each of the individual curses.
According to the former, it is the intentions a speaker has with respect to the mind of the hearer that constitutes assertion, while according to the latter, assertion is constituted by the change of the social relation between speaker and addressee that the utterance brings about.
It studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic knowledge of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and so on.
A later convert to the mystic's writings was Aldous Huxley, who wrote the foreword to the 1942 English-language edition of "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna," which he described as "the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of Ultimate Reality".
The news comes the day after Peterborough United chairman Darragh MacAnthony criticised the Scottish club's public utterances about the League One outfit's bids for their player.
Suprasegmental observations encompass information about the pitch of the speech signal, information about the intensity of the uttered utterance and information about the duration of the relevant segment.
Although the utterances he handed down about the nature of art, particularly his own art, were not exactly Olympian, they were founded in the intellectual and creative stimulation he experienced at the US version of Mt Olympus, Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, in 1955-56, where the resident gods were poets such as Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Robert Duncan.
The facts of the world (including the facts about the utterances) determine that the same person is referred to with "Bill Clinton and Bill Blythehe" and the same town with "Hope, Arkansas," and "this town".
If there is one certainty (apart from its result) about the election due on June 7th, it is that, throughout the campaign, politicians will wring their hands, make pious utterances about the growing cynicism of the electorate, and agonise aloud about whether a low turnout on voting day should be taken to signify some sort of crisis in democracy.
