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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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“This means that people do things with words (Austin 1962).”
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“These decisions, marked by the symbolic thump of the gavel, are examples of the performative events and practices that Austin famously writes of as speech acts; that is acts that have the power to reshape and alter reality when they are performed (Austin, 1962).”
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“Following Austin’s (1962) terminology, for the rest of the paper we will call these verbal moves speech acts.”
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“6 It did so, through very peculiar “felicity conditions” (Austin 1962), which not only presupposed a speech act took place, and where the perlocutionary uptake (that the addressee or overhearer was offended as Tutsi) determined that an illocutionary act happened (genocide ideology/speech), but also…”
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“This view of language has been given several names by authors who have identified it in various manifestations: the “descriptive fallacy” (Austin 1962), the “designative view” (Taylor 1985), the “denotational view” (Silverstein 2014), the “semanticizing tendency” (Nakassis 2018).”
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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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