speech act theory

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speech act theory, a modern philosophical approach to language, which has challenged the long‐standing assumption of philosophers that human utterances consist exclusively of true or false statements about the world. Initiated by the English philosopher J. L. Austin in lectures published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962), speech act theory begins with the distinction between ‘constative’ utterances (which report truly or falsely on some external state of affairs) and performatives (which are verbal actions in themselves—such as promising—rather than true or false statements). Further analysis reveals that a single utterance may comprise three distinct kinds of speech act: in addition to its simple ‘locutionary’ status as a grammatical utterance, it will have an illocutionary force (i.e. an active function such as threatening, affirming, or reassuring), and probably a perlocutionary force (an effect on the listener or reader). Since Austin's death in 1960, speech act theory has been developed further by J. R. Searle in Speech Acts (1969) and other works, and applied to problems of literary analysis by Mary Louise Pratt in Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977).