Speech Act
The act of speaking with another individual. This has become a discipline in its own right since the pioneering work of Austin in the early 1960's. It was put on a firm linguistic footing by Searle at the end of the decade and has since become part of the standard repertoire of all linguists.
Speech act is any social act which is accomplished by virtue of an utterance (e.g. promising, cursing). Associated especially with the philosophers J. Austin and J. Searle, the analysis of such illocutionary acts (and perlocutionary acts - the effects of an illocutionary act), is a central part of the subject matter of ordinary language philosophy.
The analytical study of speech acts has affinities with a number of approaches in sociology. A further example of an approach influenced by the concept of speech act is the ‘ethogenic’ social psychology of Rom Harré (Social Being, 1979), which advances the idea of a possible ‘grammar’ of social encounters, one however, that would be far more complex than implied in philosophical conceptions of speech acts.
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