Abstract

When J. L. Austin first presented his work on speech acts, it concentrated primarily on explaining how our utterances can change the non-linguistic reality around us. A new fruitful area of study explaining how saying something can constitute doing something else than saying was established, and for a very long time—in fact, until this day—philosophers debate what makes a promise a promise and not just a plan, what distinguishes an assertion from a conjecture, and what kind of mental states are required of a speaker for her illocution to be successful. The original framework, as presented by Austin’s colleague, John Searle, has shaped a vast landscape of many very different research projects, such as explaining the normative structure underlying performing speech acts, exploring the connections between illocutions and other pragmatic phenomena such as implicature and presupposition, or investigating how speech acts influence the conversational scoreboard, to name just a few. Yet another area of research centres on applying speech act theoretic devices to tackle apparently distant problems in philosophy of language, such as reference, disagreement or lying.