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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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“Important for our purposes is the fact that, as Austin (1975) pointed out, some speech acts have the grammar of declarative assertions, yet they actu - ally serve not to describe truly or falsely, but rather to institute a social state of affairs.”
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“The locutionary act of a sentence is the act of saying something in a meaningful and grammatically correct way (Austin 1962), the locutionary act of stating, ‘I like economics’, for instance.”
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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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