As the founder of speech acts theory, Austin made a distinction between “performatives” and ”constatives”, he specified there kinds of speech acts：the locutionary act, the illocutionary act, the perlocutionary act, he changed the way people considering the relation between language, mind and the world.
The contents and functions of statements are various. True value is not the only standard to assess a sentence. To start from the words and expressions for everyday use, Austin indicated that on different occasions, in different language circumstances, the language use is an activity of performing an action. The object of linguistic study should be the action fulfilled by the words and phrases, linguistic theory is just a part of linguistic acts theory.
Austin saw language as a kind of social activity, the notion of performatives: the performative utterance has its own special job, it is used to perform an action rather than just to say or assert something. There is no true or false to evaluate performative sentences, but the performatives could be void or inappropriate when something goes wrong. Then Austin stated characteristics of performatives, he examined the origin of failures and explained several “Infelicities” and six “felicity conditions” of avoiding unhappy function of performatives.
In this article, there are two points provoking my interest. First of all, we know the appropriate circumstance and conventional formula are of importance for the functioning of performatives—to perform an action, vice versa, the utterance can also be influenced by acts, I’d like to emphasize the effect of actions on performatives. Austin gave us several examples illustrating this argument, the most representative one is that marriage can be effected by cohabiting rather than uttering words in a ceremony. If we want the action being seen as done, the performative utterance is not the only necessary prerequisite. That’s to say, people can use their own bodily movements and actions to express meaning, then the body and their actions become signs of expressing meaning instead of performatives. Language and action are both the way connecting the world and our mind. Actually, I think this argument narrows the gap between acts and utterances. It’s not difficult to understand, because there is no impassable gulf separating the utterances and actions that’s also what Austin what to express.
Secondly, in performatives, Austin found other values which function independently among the words and grammatical structure of the utterance, all the illocutionary acts can convey meanings, they also have a certain force. he differentiated these two linguistic terms—semantic meaning and pragmatic force, performatives mean uttering un utterance which has a certain conventional force, like give orders, warning, make a bet, etc..Because of force, listeners can understand the sense of utterances through context, and utterances can have certain effect on listeners. One of the best examples is the law of effect. On an appropriate occasion, after appropriate procedures, all the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, the judge says:” I announce you guilty!” or the minister announces on a marriage ceremony:”I now announce you husband and wife!”, then their utterances will produce a force to make the announcement effective and make listeners believe this is true. The purport of utterance should be the combination of sense and force. This argument reflects the connection and distinction between semantics and pragmatics, it’s also a symbolic representation of Austin’s philosophical intelligence.