Puheaktiteoria

Puheaktiteoria, or speech act theory, is a philosophical and linguistic concept that examines the way language is used to perform actions. It posits that when people speak, they are not simply conveying information, but are also performing specific acts through their utterances. This theory was significantly developed by philosophers J.L. Austin and John Searle.

Austin, in his seminal work "How to Do Things with Words," distinguished between constative utterances, which describe a state of affairs, and performative utterances, which actually perform an action by being said. For example, saying "I promise to be there" is not just describing a promise, it is the act of making a promise. He later refined this by identifying three types of acts performed in any utterance: a locutionary act (the literal meaning of the words), an illocutionary act (the speaker's intention or purpose), and a perlocutionary act (the effect of the utterance on the listener).

John Searle further developed Austin's ideas, categorizing illocutionary acts into five main types: assertions (stating facts), directives (commanding or requesting), commissives (committing to an action), expressives (expressing feelings), and declarations (changing the state of the world through the utterance, like "You are fired"). Speech act theory is important because it highlights the pragmatic dimension of language, emphasizing that meaning is not solely determined by words themselves but by how they are used in specific contexts and the intentions behind them. It has had a profound impact on fields such as linguistics, philosophy of language, communication studies, and artificial intelligence.