Bakhtin formulates his theory of the utterance on two occasions: once during the late twenties, in the texts signed by Medvedev and especially by Voloshinov; and in several works published at the end of the fifties, some thirty years later. I will present these two syntheses separately, although there is no great difference between them (in fact, the only changes involve accentuations of various aspects of the utterance).

The first general formulations concerning the utterance are already to be found in Freudism (1927); one page of The Formal Method in Literary Studies (1928) evokes this problem from a similar viewpoint, with an insistence on the social rather than the individual nature of the utterance; but Bakhtin introduces here a new notion, which is not reiterated in subsequent writings: that of a discursive strategy.

Discursive strategy plays a particularly significant role in daily verbal communication by determining its form as well...