But the prosecutors know them very well, Ms. Noller said, adding that they have studied his every public utterance, whether from the lobby of the federal courthouse, the pages of his book, speeches to college students or his television and newspaper interviews.
But then, it seems, S would be making the same utterance whether or not a pain were occurring.
Passionate utterances, whether of love or anger, will always look embarrassing under a prurient stranger's eye better not to utter them.
There may now be a move to curb some of his more extreme utterances, but whether this will materially affect Iran's underlying aim of developing its own nuclear industry, giving it the potential to build nuclear weapons, is doubtful.
The court describes the factors they will consider as "(1) the frequency of the discriminatory conduct; (2) its severity; (3) whether it is physically threatening or humiliating, or merely an offensive utterance; and (4) whether it interferes with an employee's work performance".
This is because DNS normally uses its interpretation of the beginning of the next utterance to decide whether the pause that caused it to recognize two utterances does or does not correspond to an actual sentence break.
It seems that these authors, and perhaps speakers in general, find it easier to agree about whether an utterance was an assertion than about whether it was or was not proper.
Richard Friedman argues: "[I]f there is no way of telling whether an utterance is authoritative, except by evaluating its contents to see whether it deserves to be accepted in its own right, then the distinction between an authoritative utterance and advice or rational persuasion will have collapsed" (Friedman 1973, 132).
There must also be surface properties, which are the properties by which we can tell whether an utterance is an assertion, for instance that it is made by means of uttering a sentence in the indicative mood.
More generally, it is often impossible to decide, just from the words a speaker uses, whether their utterance is susceptible to one or another form of assessment.
One question is whether an utterance is an assertion proper that $p$ if that content is not exactly what is expressed, or whether it is an act of a related kind, perhaps an implicature.
