ABSTRACT
All language can be thought about in terms of the constative and the performative. On the one hand, there is language as descriptive, as saying something about something. On the other, there is language as performative, as not only saying something but doing or performing something at the same time. ‘I do’ (as words spoken by the prospective wife or husband in answer to a particular question in the marriage service), ‘I declare this meeting inquorate’, ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twenty pounds’: these are all examples in which language is clearly supposed to be doing something. If it were not, marriage would be impossible, committee meetings would never end (or, more happily, might never take place at all) and a twenty-pound note would be quite worthless, a mere curiosity. The distinction between constative and performative statements is derived from a particular strand of Anglo-American philosophy known as speech-act theory. Speech-act theory is most famously associated with the work of the Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin and in particular with his book entitled How to do Things with Words (1962). It has
become an important area of contemporary philosophy and linguistics but has also proved groundbreaking in the field of literary criticism and theory.
