Linguistics & Language · Semantics & Pragmatics
A topic within Semantics & Pragmatics, itself one of 9 topics in that field and part of Linguistics & Language.
2 works
J. L. Austin
Argues that many utterances do not describe the world but perform an action in saying them, such as promising or naming a ship, and that these performatives should be judged as successful or unsuccessful rather than true or false.
John R. Searle
Replaces Austin's open-ended list of speech-act types with five underlying categories, argued for from the conditions that must hold for an utterance to count as each one.