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How To Do Things With Words
Open accessAbstract
This work sets out the author's conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts for at least the last ten years of his life. Starting from an examination of his already well-known distinction between performative utterances and statements, he finally abandons that distinction, replacing it with a more general theory of ‘illocutionary forces’ of utterances, which has important bearings on a wide variety of philosophical problems.
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“Bourdieu borrowed from Austin (1975: 16) in emphasizing ' misfires ' or blips, instances in which attempted speech acts (or by extension, attempted practices of any sort) fail because of some maladaption of practice to the situation (Austin's 'infelicities').”
From Bourdieu, Historicity, and Historical Sociology (2011) · cites this paper as Austin, 1975
In the citing paper
“Not knowing these intended meanings or illocutions, in Austin's (1975) words, interlocutors' misunderstanding is inevitable.”
From Teachers’ Classroom Interactional Competence: Scale Development and Validation (2023) · cites this paper as Austin's (1975)
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Metadata
- Authors
- Austin, J. L.
- Corresponding author
- Austin, J.L.
- Venue
- Routledge eBooks
- Publisher
- Oxford University PressOxford
- Published
- 1975-09-18
- Pages
- 177-182
- OpenAlex
- W1576632330
- Cited by
- 21,496
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 432 · 2025: 587 · 2024: 705 · 2023: 823 · 2022: 768 · 2021: 996 · 2020: 1094 · 2019: 1291 · 2018: 1056 · 2017: 881 · 2016: 898 · 2015: 873 · 2014: 960 · 2013: 858 · 2012: 797
- FWCI
- 374.62
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Licence
- other-oa
- Locations
- Routledge eBooks (publishedVersion)
- DIAL (Catholic University of Leuven) (submittedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
- Keywords
- performatives, illocutionary force, statements, speech acts, pragmatics, philosophy of language
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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