Is a giggle a kind of speech? Is a literary giggle? In a nutshell that's the question I want to pursue in this chapter. In the Miller's Tale Alisoun the carpenter's wife plays a joke on the unsuspecting but hopeful Absolon. Then she giggles: “‘Tehee!’ quod she, and clapte the wyndow to …” (1.3738). The line is a double articulation. In semiotic terms the line is part of a poetic ‘utterance.’ In pragmatic terms Alisoun's vocalization is a speech ‘utterance.’ What are the implications of the utterance for the tale as a narrative ‘utterance’? In his semiotics of narrative and dialogic speech Bakhtin always uses the term utterance (Rus. slovo, word or speech in use, not language in the abstract) in the sense of language in action, whether oral or written. Depending on context, an utterance can be a single word, a line of poetry, a chapter of a narrative, or the story itself. A word or sentence “belongs to nobody, and only by functioning as a whole utterance does it become the expression of the position of someone speaking individually in a concrete situation of speech communication” (Bakhtin 1994: 84). Context and dialogic interaction are everything with respect to pragmatics and communication. For Bakhtin, “The boundaries of each concrete utterance as a unit of speech communication are determined by a change of speaking subjects, that is, a change of speakers” (Bakhtin 1994: 81; cf. 1994: 62-72, 81-87). An utterance presupposes and entails both a prior utterance and an answering utterance, an addressee and a situation: “Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient” (1994: 85). As part of conversational ‘work,’ speakers need to discover what the other means to say and respond in a way the speaker thinks is needed or appropriate, which does not necessarily mean in the way the other expects or wants or wants to say.