speechacts

Speech acts are utterances that perform actions through language. The term originates with J. L. Austin, who distinguished locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts in How to Do Things with Words. A locutionary act is the utterance and its literal meaning; the illocutionary act is the speaker's intended force (asking, promising, warning, etc.); the perlocutionary act is the effect on the listener (persuasion, harm, etc.). Some utterances are performatives, in which saying something constitutes the action itself, as in “I apologize,” “I promise to come,” or “I hereby declare.” Other utterances are constatives (or statements) describing the world.

Searle refined the theory, listing illocutionary act types: verdictives (judgments), exercitives (rules and actions affecting behavior), commissives (promises, commitments), directives (requests, commands), expressives (emotions and attitudes), and declarations (speech acts that alter social reality, such as baptisms). For an illocutionary act to be successful (felicity), certain conditions must be met: the speaker intends the act, uses conventional linguistic means appropriate to the act, and the listener recognizes the force within the social context.

Indirect speech acts show how utterances can have a different illocutionary force than their literal content. For example, “Could you pass the salt?” typically requests rather than questions about ability.

Speech act theory is central to pragmatics and the philosophy of language, highlighting how language both expresses and accomplishes actions. It faces challenges from cross-cultural variation, context dependence, and debates about the status of performatives and the universality of felicity conditions.