ABSTRACT
Approaching pragmatics as the study of how we make meaning through what we do with language, this chapter focuses on speech acts, and rehearses Austin’s theory of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. In particular, the chapter discusses the performative properties of utterances, and draws on a wide range of real world utterances to illustrate the difference between truth-conditional propositional meaning and felicity-determined illocutionary force. The second half of the chapter contains an account of Searle’s theory of indirect speech acts as well as a section on the way in which speech acts constitute evidence of metapragmatic awareness. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of the role of speech acts both as a manifestation of Peircean pragmatism and in shaping linguistic pragmatics as we know it today.
