How to Do Things with Words

Introduction

The book reproduces the twelve William James Lectures Austin gave at Harvard in 1955. It was edited after his death by J. O. Urmson from Austin’s notes and published in 1962. Austin begins with the contrast between “constative” statements, which are true or false, and “performative” utterances such as “I bet” or “I do” at a wedding, and lists the ways in which they can misfire. In the course of the lectures he finds that this contrast cannot be drawn cleanly, since stating is also an act, and replaces it with a general theory of the forces of utterances. The lectures are among the founding texts of pragmatics in linguistics.

Connections

Taken up in

• Speech Acts1969 · John Searle
• Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity2003 · Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Criticized in

• Signature Event Context1971 · Jacques Derrida

More works by J. L. Austin

• 1962Sense and Sensibilia

Appears in

• Journey ‘The Linguistic Turn’ · Stop 7 of 10