Speech act theory

1.Constative  utterance :  Lat. constate‘to be manifest; to be an established fact’
In the early stages of J. L. Austin’s philosophy of language, including the first part of his 1958 lectures on speech act theory, this term denotes utterances that describe or depict facts or states of affairs and so may be either true or false. In this sense, ‘constative’ corresponds to the philosophical term ‘statement’. In the latter half of his lectures, he virtually abandoned his performative-constative distinction, concluding that constatives also have a performative aspect (the actual uttering of a statement) and , as such, should be considered illocutionary acts.

2.Performative utterance：J. L. Austin’ term which , in the first stage of his speech act theory, refers to utterances in the uttering of which , in appropriate circumstances, one performs paticular actions. Performatives contrast with constatives, which describe states or actions. In developing his speech act theory further, Austin downplayed this distinction of two different utterance types in favor of distinction between two 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) implict (or primary or primitive) performative uttrances and (b) explict performative utterance reamins. With the primary (implicit) uttrance of you are mistaken, one can just as easily assert that the adressee is mistaken as with the explict utterance of I assert that you are mistaken. Primary utterances in general have no lexical illocutioary indicators; in contrast, explicit performative utterances usually have the form of a matrix sentence with the performative verbs in the first person present indicative, an indirect object denoting the adressee, and an embedded sentence. The self-reference of the explicit performance utterance can be highlightened by insertion of hereby: I hereby christen this ship the Queen Mary.

Performative verb: Semantically and pragmatically defined class of verbs(e.g. to promise, to command, to christen, to swear, among others), the use of which in explicitly performative utterances cause prescisely that action to be carried out that is expressed by the paticular verb. Performative verbs are distinguished from perlocutive verbs such as to provoke, to convince, to humble, which cannot be used performatively (I hereby convince you to vote democratic) and instead describe reactions partly under the control of the addressee. Not all illocutionary verbs, that is, verbs denote illocutions, are performative verbs. For example, to threaten is an illocutionary , but not a performative verb. This distinction is supported by the fact that only performative verbs can be used with hereby.