ABSTRACT
Modern speech act theory is often credited to J. L. Austin. His central idea was that there is a class of utterances that do not describe things but rather do things. Austin distinguishes explicit and implicit performatives, based on the presence or absence of a performative verb, most commonly a verb of saying, making the speech act explicit. Austin's distinction between explicit and implicit performatives is an early recognition of the immense difficulties involved in ascribing actions to speech acts. If all speech acts had a performative verb, this would provide a nice criterion by which to identify the actions accomplished by acts of speech. According to Austin, a speech act integrates three kinds of acts: the locutionary act, the illocutionary act, and the perlocutionary act. To complicate matters considerably, most utterances perform indirect speech acts. Speech acts are one of the most prolific areas of corpus pragmatics research. They have been extensively studied both in a synchronic and a diachronic perspective.
