ABSTRACT
J.L.Austin’s term which, in the first stage of his speech act theory, refers to utterances in the uttering of which, in appropriate circumstances, one performs particular actions. Performatives contrast with constative utterances, which describe actions or states. In developing his speech act theory further, Austin downplayed this distinction of two different utterance types in favor of a distinction between two different aspects of speech acts, the locutionary and illocutionary. The original distinction between performative and constative became increasingly problematic as Austin began to present all utterances as performative utterances in some respect or other. However, the distinction between (a) implicit (or primary or primitive) performative utterances and (b) explicit performative utterances remains. With the primary (implicit) utterance of you’re mistaken, one can just as easily assert that the addressee is mistaken as with the explicit utterance of I assert that you’re mistaken. Primary performative utterances in general have no lexical illocutionary indicators ( illocution); in contrast, explicit performative utterances usually have the form of a matrix sentence with a performative verb in the first person present indicative, an indirect object denoting the addressee, and an embedded sentence. The self-reference of the explicit performative utterance can be highlighted by insertion of hereby: I (hereby) christen this ship the ‘Queen Mary.’
