ABSTRACT
J. L. Austin contributes to a larger debate about language as a system of structures or a group of practices. For Austin, the first set of examples are "performative," while the second set are "constative." Building on the idea that language performs an action, that language is a practice or event, helps us make sense of texts that seem more interested in doing something rather than saying something. Austin's simple concept reframes language as a set of acts, but how does the notion of performative utterances encourage us to think differently about literary texts, films, art, cultural practices, and other representations? Austin's theory of performatives and his larger discussion of "illocutionary acts" sparked the interest of Jacques Derrida, and the people can follow this discussion in Limited Inc which contains several documents. Although Austin's theory of performatives seems limited to particular kinds of sentences, especially statements that are not true or false but valid or felicitous.
