The Concept Of Speech Act By John L. Austin

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The concept of speech act was firstly introduced by the British philosopher John L. Austin in a lecture delivered at Harvard in 1955, later published as a monograph titled “How to do things with words” in (1962). This concept captures an important feature of language: saying something can also involve doing something. Austin differentiates between two separate parts of speech: constatives and performative. Constatives are sentences that describe something as true or false, and performatives are sentences that denote an action. For example, the sentence "I [hereby] bet you $5 it will rain" does not describe an event but constitute a bet, Austin refers to such sentence as performatives and distinguishes them from constative sentence such as "it …show more content…
Suppose someone is joking with some friends saying, 'I now pronounce you husband and wife.' He/she in fact, has not officially made them a married couple. This speech act is infelicitous. As Levinson (1983:230) suggests, some performatives "are … rather special sorts of ceremony". Ceremonial performatives are associated with specific (felicity) conventions associated with an institution such as a church. They must also be uttered by a person with the authority to do so, and in the manner prescribed by the institution. However, if the same sentence "I now pronounce you husband and wife" were uttered by a register or priest to a woman and a man in a church or registry office in the presence of witnesses, the couple will be legally married. Austin (1962) distinguished between two types of performatives, direct or explicit and indirect or implicit performatives. When a speaker uses a direct speech act he/she wants to communicate the literal meaning that the words conventionally express in order to avoid misunderstanding or to emphasize the speaker's authority and power. Otherwise, when a speaker uses an indirect speech act he/she wants to communicate a different meaning from the apparent surface meaning which in turn sometimes leads to misunderstanding in the conversation and a hearer might have to ask for example "Is this a …show more content…
He stated that all utterances including constatives could be seen as "doing things" just like performatives. The result is a full-blown theory of action (Archer et al. 2012). For this, Austin distinguishes three types of acts: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. A loctutionary act refers to producing a meaningful linguistic expression, or uttering a sentence such as “I am sorry!” The illocutionary act refers to the message that is transmitted and may not correspond to the literal meaning of the words which is in this case an apology. Finally, the perlocutionary act refers to the effect of the illocutionary act on the addressee. For example, the addressee can react by accepting or declining the

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