ABSTRACT
Speech-act theory was developed by the Oxford philosopher J.L.Austin in the 1930s, and expounded in a series of William James lectures which Austin gave at Harvard University in 1955. These lectures, twelve in all, were subsequently published under the title How To Do Things With Words in 1962. The theory arises in reaction to what Austin (1962 p. 3) calls the descriptive fallacy, the view that a declarative sentence is always used to describe some state of affairs, some fact, which it must do truly or falsely.
