locutionaryillocutionaryperlocutionary

Locutionaryillocutionaryperlocutionary is not a standard term in itself but points to the three closely related concepts at the center of Austin's speech act theory: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Together they describe how a spoken utterance can convey what is said, perform a speech act, and affect others.

The locutionary act refers to the actual utterance—the phonetic form, vocabulary, and syntax—and its propositional content. It is the basic statement or question that is linguistically encoded. The locution is the public surface form whose meaning may be literal or figurative.

The illocutionary act concerns the speaker’s intention and the semantic force of the utterance. It captures what the speaker is doing in saying it, such as making a promise, issuing a command, offering an apology, or giving a warning. Illocutionary force is often analyzed with felicity conditions that determine whether the act succeeds in a given context. Illocutionary acts are frequently categorized into directives, commissives, verdictives, expressives, and declaratives.

The perlocutionary act concerns the effects on the listener or the surrounding circumstances that result from the utterance, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, or prompting action. These effects may align with or diverge from the speaker’s stated intention and can occur beyond the speaker’s control.

In practice, many utterances are analyzed for their illocutionary force, while some are explicit performatives (for example, I promise, I apologize) in which the act is inseparable from the utterance itself. The framework remains influential in pragmatics, linguistics, philosophy of language, and discourse analysis.