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(1977) Speech act phenomenology, Dordrecht, Springer.

Speech act communication

Richard L Lanigan

pp. 66-83

Austin in his Harvard Lectures discovered what he calls the "performative". We have come at this notion linguistically as a structural item and as a matter of content in use. Our analysis thus far suggests that of the original category distinctions between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, we are left with a questionable distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. The illocutionary act is an utterance whose performance carries a certain "force" which suggests that it functions to alter situations. Whereas, the perlocutionary act is a performance that carries a given "effect" which evokes a change in the situation. The essential problem seems to be in the definition of the 'situation". In the illocutionary act we have a situation that contains action and absorbs a modification. While in the case of the perlocutionary act we find a situation followed by another, yet causally related, situation. In short, the illocutionary situation is one of amendment, whereas that of the perlocutionary situation is one of addendum.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-1045-0_5

Full citation:

Lanigan, R.L. (1977). Speech act communication, in Speech act phenomenology, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 66-83.

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