ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how people can do things with words, as crystallized in Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games and John Austin and John Searle's Speech Act Theory. Wittgenstein was one of the earliest philosophers of language who took issue with the idea that the function of language was to represent the world. The idea that language does more than representing finds its full-blown articulation in the Speech Act Theory developed by two other philosophers of language: Austin and Searle, who were the creators of such analytical vocabulary as performatives, felicities, and speech acts. For Austin, the abstract notion of speech act may be conceived of as including three specific acts: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. The locutionary act is the act of saying something, the illocutionary act is the act of doing something, and the perlocutionary act is the act of producing some consequential effects on the participants.
