After shortly surveying different definitions of the term utterance this paper defines the utterance-type, which is the unit of pragmatic competence. The utterance-type must be described from grammatical and pragmatic points of view. The grammatical description is made by relating utterance-types to sentences. The pragmatic description is made by defining pragmatic functions, which the utterance-types fulfil in use with respect to a given physical and cognitive context. After defining the utterance-type in general, this paper characterizes it in a particular form of language use, i.e. in the communicative one. Finally, the utterance-tokens in concrete situations are considered.