How to Do Things with Words

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How to Do Things with Words is a posthumously published book of lectures by the English philosopher J. L. Austin. First issued in 1962 by Clarendon Press and Harvard University Press, it is based on the William James Lectures that Austin delivered at Harvard University in 1955. The work is widely regarded as the founding text of speech act theory and a classic of ordinary language philosophy and linguistic pragmatics. In the lectures Austin introduces and develops the notion of a performative utterance, analyses the conditions under which such utterances are happy or unhappy, and ultimately replaces the simple contrast between constative and performative sentences with a more general theory of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. The book has had a lasting impact on philosophy, linguistics, literary theory, legal theory and other disciplines concerned with language and communication.

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