Speech Acts

Speech acts are utterances that perform actions in the social world, not merely describe it. J.L. Austin showed that saying 'I promise' or 'I sentence you to ten years' changes reality by being uttered under the right conditions — what he called performative utterances. John Searle later systematized this into a taxonomy of illocutionary acts (assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, declarations), arguing that every utterance has a propositional content and an illocutionary force that determines what the speaker is doing.

The theory bridges pragmatics and philosophy of language, but leaves open whether speech acts can be fully formalized — a question that drives illocutionary logic and the computational modeling of dialogue. The conditions under which a speech act succeeds — what Austin called 'felicity conditions' — include not only the speaker's intention but the existence of institutional frameworks (promises require a social practice of promising, verdicts require a court). This makes speech act theory as much a theory of social construction as a theory of meaning.