Performative
Performative is a kind of utterance that performs with language the deed to which it refers (e.g., I promise to come) instead of describing some state of affairs. The term was coined by the philosopher L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words (1962) as part of his speech act theory [Baldick, p. 188].
The term performative is now found in grammatical and semantic analysis to refer to a sentence where the action is ‘performed’ because of the sentence uttered, e.g., I apologize, I promise, etc. The original distinction was drawn between performative and constative utterances: the latter are descriptive statements that can be analyzed in terms of truth values; performatives, on the other hand, are expressions of activity that are not analyzable in truth-value terms [Crystal, p. 357].
The term performative was developed by the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin to describe various executive speech acts, such as utterances that possess some degree of inherent agency. However, simple declarative locations are not inherently performative. Still, they become so under certain conditions, such as persuasion, oath (illocutionary act), or ceremonial conventions such as the marriage rite or the Eucharist (perlocutionary act) [Cuddon, p. 525].
Performative is an utterance that is itself an act of doing something. A typical utterance, such as I’m going to a film, cannot readily be regarded as doing something: saying this does not constitute going to a film. But some utterances are different. For example, saying I promise to buy you a teddy bear, all by itself, constitutes making a promise to buy a teddy bear, and nothing further is required to complete (as opposed to fulfilling) the promise. An utterance of this sort is called an (explicit) performative utterance, and a verb that can be so used, in this case, promise, is performative [Trask, p. 151].
A performative is a sentence or other linguistic expression that actually does or accomplishes something when expressed in an appropriate context [YourDictionary]
⠀ Chris Baldick. (2015). The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
⠀ Cuddon J.A. (2013). A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
⠀ David Crystal. (2008). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 6th Edition. New-Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
⠀ Performative utterance. YourDictionary. Retrieved from: https://www.yourdictionary.com/performative-utterance.
⠀ Trask R.L. (1999). Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics. London: Routledge.