Sociolinguistics

Speech act

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For the United States law against libel tourism, see SPEECH Act.

A speech act in linguistics and the philosophy of language is an utterance that has performative function in language and communication. According to Kent Bach, "almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience." The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts are commonly taken to include such acts as promising, ordering, greeting, warning, inviting and congratulating.

What is a Speech Act? (Carla center for advanced research on language acquisition)

A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: "I’m sorry I forgot your birthday. I just let it slip my mind." Speech acts include real-life interactions and require not only knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that language within a given culture.

SPECH ACTS THEORY

Definition:

A subfield of pragmatics concerned with the ways in which words can be used not only to present information but also to carry out actions. See speech act.

Speech-act theory, as introduced by Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin (How to Do Things With Words, 1962) and further developed by American philosopher J.R. Searle, considers the types of acts that utterances can be said to perform:

* Locutionary Acts

* Illocutionary Acts

* Perlocutionary Acts

Definition:

In speech-act theory,...