Through his investigation, he establishes to three key senses in which to say something is to do something. The humor helps.Īustin finds no clear way to distinguish performative utterances from mere statements of fact. I often felt dragged through his later taxonomizing, when he tries to evaluate grammatical heuristics for distinguishing performatives. However, I found his taxonomy of infelicities–ways speech-acts can go wrong and fail in their effect–compelling, especially as he takes a joking tone when producing examples, occasionally absurd. Neither of these points were revelations for me: Language is clearly an important tool we use to do things, like conduct business or set cultural laws.

By examining how performative uses of language either fail or succeed to have their customary effect, Austin further distinguishes the ways performatives function within social and cultural contexts. By offering a wealth of everyday examples (such as “I do” when said in a marriage ceremony or “I bet” when playing a card game) he convinced me quite quickly that there are many ways that we use words to do things. I was initially drawn in by Austin’s distinction between the constative and performative uses of language. Here I’ll try talking about what seems to me most important from Austin’s observations and what applications do I see for these theories for my work in composition. While I took great pleasure in reading Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, I am daunted by the task of summarizing and reflecting on it.

Jl austin how to do things with words