J. L. Austin in the context of "Illocutionary act"

In the philosophy of language and linguistics, a speech act is an utterance considered as an instance of action in a social context rather than as the mere expression of a proposition. To say "I resign", "I apologise" or "You're fired" is, in suitable circumstances, to perform the very act of resigning, apologising or dismissing, not simply to describe it. Speech-act theory therefore treats speaking a language as a kind of rule-governed social behaviour in which people make claims, issue orders, ask questions, make promises and so on by means of utterances.

Following J. L. Austin and John R. Searle, many accounts distinguish at least three levels of act in ordinary utterances: the locutionary act of producing a meaningful expression, the illocutionary act performed in saying something (such as asserting, warning, requesting or promising), and the perlocutionary act consisting in its further effects on an audience, such as persuading, amusing or alarming them. Later work has added notions such as metalocutionary acts, which organise or comment on the discourse itself, and has analysed performative utterances and indirect speech acts, in which one kind of act is performed by way of another.

In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).

Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation, as well as nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax, which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. Pragmatics, together with semantics and syntactics, is a part of semiotics. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. In 1938, Charles Morris first distinguished pragmatics as an independent subfield within semiotics, alongside syntax and semantics. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J. L. Austin and Paul Grice.

In linguistics and the philosophy of language, a locutionary act is the performance of an utterance, and is one of the types of force, in addition to illocutionary act and perlocutionary act, typically cited in Speech Act Theory. Speech Act Theory is a subfield of pragmatics that explores how words and sentences are not only used to present information, but also to perform actions. As an utterance, a locutionary act is considered a performative, in which both the audience and the speaker must trust certain conditions about the speech act. These conditions are called felicity conditions and are divided into three different categories: the essential condition, the sincerity condition, and the preparatory condition.

The term equally refers to the surface meaning of an utterance because, according to J. L. Austin's posthumous How To Do Things With Words, a speech act should be analysed as a locutionary act (i.e. the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic, and rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic, and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance), as well as an illocutionary act (the semantic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its real, intended meaning), and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act (i.e. its actual effect, whether intended or not).

In the philosophy of language and speech acts theory, performative utterances are sentences which not only describe a given reality, but also change the social reality they are describing.

In a 1955 lecture series, later published as How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin argued against a positivist philosophical claim that the utterances always "describe" or "constate" something and are thus always true or false. After mentioning several examples of sentences which are not so used, and not truth-evaluable (among them nonsensical sentences, interrogatives, directives and "ethical" propositions), he introduces "performative" sentences or illocutionary act as another instance.

Ordinary language philosophy (OLP, sometimes called linguistic philosophy) is a methodological approach within analytic philosophy which treats many traditional philosophical problems as the result of misunderstandings of how words are ordinarily used. Rather than proposing ideal or artificial languages, ordinary language philosophers investigate the actual use of expressions in everyday contexts, and often argue that once such uses are described carefully, many philosophical "problems" dissolve or change their shape.

In the twentieth century OLP was primarily associated with the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, early to mid-century philosophers at the University of Cambridge such as G. E. Moore and John Wisdom, and mid-century philosophers at the University of Oxford, including Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, H. L. A. Hart, and Paul Grice. Because a number of its most prominent practitioners taught at Oxford, OLP is sometimes informally referred to as "Oxford philosophy".

In linguistics and philosophy of language, an utterance is felicitous if it is pragmatically well-formed. An utterance can be infelicitous because it is self-contradictory, trivial, irrelevant, or because it is somehow inappropriate for the context of utterance. Researchers in semantics and pragmatics use felicity judgments much as syntacticians use grammaticality judgments. An infelicitous sentence is marked with the pound sign.

The terms felicitous and infelicitous were first proposed by J. L. Austin as part of his theory of speech acts. In his thinking, a performative utterance is neither true nor false, but can instead be deemed felicitous or infelicitous according to a set of conditions whose interpretation differs depending on whether the utterance in question is a declaration ("I sentence you to death"), a request ("I ask that you stop doing that") or a warning ("I warn you not to jump off the roof").