Performative utterance in the context of Nonsensical

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, 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 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").

This is a timeline of declarations of war during World War II.

A declaration of war is a formal act by which one nation goes to war against another. The declaration is usually the act of delivering a performative speech or the presentation of a signed document by an authorized party of a national government in order to create a state of war between two or more sovereign states. The official international protocol for declaring war was defined in The Hague Peace Conference of 1907 (or Hague II). For the diplomatic maneuvering behind these events, which led to hostilities between nations during World War II, see Diplomatic history of World War II.