Kent Bach, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry SPEECH ACTS Making a statement may be the paradigmatic use of language, but there are all sorts of other things we can do with words. We can make requests, ask questions, give orders, make promises, give thanks, offer apologies, and so on. Moreover, almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by ...

Anthropoetics II, no. 2 (January 1997) Performative-Constative Revisited: The Genetics of Austin's Theory of Speech Acts Richard van Oort Department of English and Comparative Literature University of California at Irvine Irvine, CA 92697 rvanoort@uci.edu It may seem unlikely that so paradoxical and apparently unmaintainable a thesis as J.L. Austin's elementary distinction between performative ...