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Topic: Performative utterance

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Meaning

Speech act

John Searle

Paradigm

	Performative - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		An utterance is a performative when its function is to perform the action mentioned rather than to express a proposition about it (as a constative does).
		Performatives are a special case of illocutions, which form the wider set of utterances that perform actions rather than expressing propositions ("hooray!" is the act of cheering, "look out!" is the action of warning but not the action of looking out; they are thus illocutionary but not performative).
		A clear example of a performative utterance is "I promise"; uttered in the appropriate context, this is the action of promising rather than a description of such an act.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Performative (263 words)

	Performative utterance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Performative utterances are speech acts which perform the action the sentence describes.
		Performative utterances can be 'transformative' performatives, which create an instant change of personal or environmental status or 'promisory' performatives, which describe the world as it might be in the future.
		Performative utterances can be revoked, either by the person who uttered them ("I take back my promise"), or by some other party not immediately involved, like the state (for example, gay marriage vows).
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Performative_utterance (1068 words)

	[No title]
		Performative utterance are not indirect speech acts, in the sense in which an utterance of "Can you pass the salt?" can be an indirect speech act of requesting the hearer to pass the salt.
		The intention to label the utterance as a promise is sufficient for the intention to be a promise, because the intention to label it as a promise carries a commitment.
		In the case of performative utterances, the assertion is derived from the declaration and not the declaration from the assertion.
	socrates.berkeley.edu /~jsearle/performatives.html (8092 words)

	van Oort - Performative-Constative Revisited: The Genetics of Austin's Theory of Speech Acts
		The peculiarity of the performative utterance, in contrast to the constative, is that it does not describe a state of affairs independent of itself, but that it is itself the reality it describes.
		Single-word utterances, such as the cry "Fire!", demonstrate this primitive level of ostensive utterance, which requires the context of the scene in which it is uttered to be understood.
		The difference between an utterance that is fictional and one that is propositional is not that the former is parasitic upon the latter, but precisely that the latter forgoes the primacy of its independent construction of an imagined state of affairs to relate this conceptual scene to a worldly reality.
	www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu /Ap0202/Vano.htm (7495 words)

	20th WCP: Impossible Descriptions, Superfluous Descriptions, and Mead's "I"
		An utterance with an indicative grammatical form which has a propositional content which cannot (in general or in the context at hand) possibly be used to say something true.
		An utterance with an indicative grammatical form which has a propositional content which cannot (in general or in the context at hand) possibly be used to present ("logically") new information about the world.
		An utterance 'I exist' is a performative tautology and a superfluous description since the asserted propositional content describes one of the pragmatic presuppositions for itself.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Anth/AnthJoha.htm (3040 words)

	Speech
		To make the statement “I promise that p” (in which p is the propositional content of the utterance) is to perform the act of promising as opposed to making a statement that may be judged true or false.
		Austin creates a clear distinction between performatives and constantives, statements that attempt to describe reality and can be judged true or false, but he eventually comes to the conclusion that most utterances, at their base, are performative in nature.
		To show how statements (performatives) work, linguistic scholars have reduced the illocutionary act to the symbolic expression F(p), in which p is the propositional content and F is the illocutionary force.
	rhetorica.net /speech.htm (1112 words)

	Deconstruction and Speech Act Theory - Austin, Derrida, Searle - by Kevin Halion
		A difference between the performance of a promise and, for example, a baptism is that in the former case but not in the latter uttering certain words is sufficient to perform the act.
		One judges a person’s performative utterance purporting to bring about a certain state of affairs by judging whether it conventionally succeeded (if there is a possibility that it could have failed) or whether it was sincere (in certain cases where sincerity is germane).
		The upshot of this dialectic is a synthesis of the performative and the constative as the speech act.
	www.e-anglais.com /thesis (18160 words)

	van Oort - Review Article (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		For Esterhammer, this opposition between a collective performative and a performative authorized by speaker or by language is ultimately irresolvable since the tension resides in the speech act itself.
		This performative, which Esterhammer calls "sociopolitical" and which she associates more or less explicitly with Austin's conception of the performative, is dependent upon preestablished convention.
		Increasingly, the phenomenological performative modeled on divine creativity is displaced by a sociopolitical awareness that such transcendental performativity is dependent upon an inherited institutional and conventional context.
	www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu /ap0102/vano.htm (4845 words)

	Andreas Runkel
		According to Searle (1989) and Recanati (1987), performative utterances are declarational acts, i.e., the prefix contributes to the whole proposition of the utterance and the constitution of the performative act is obtained by means of the speaker’s special intention.
		I propose to regard the performative prefix as a means for lexicalising these pragmatic universals, thereby allowing for the exact specification of the intended illocutionary act by “signalling” it, as opposed to “stating” it.
		The correlation of performatives with the declarative sentence pattern is regarded as a mere reflex of this sentence type’s predominant use for constative speech acts.
	webhost.ua.ac.be /tisp/viewabstract.php?id=462 (573 words)

	John L. Austin, Authority : A Concise Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion
		Performatives are effective or ineffective, 'operative' or void, rather than true or false.
		An utterance may count as the performing of an action, as when the raising of an umpire's finger may count as a declarative verdict.
		Performatives cannot adequately be grouped in accordance with stereotypical examples or verbs in the English language.
	www.enotalone.com /article/5217.html (1783 words)

	Acting and Conversing
		performatives - a class of sentences for which truth conditions are irrelevant; the uttering of a performative sentence constitutes an action in and of itself; such sentences are not so much said as done
		G.1 The performer of the speech act must be sincere in performing.
		G.2 The performer of the speech act must act subsequently in a manner consistent with the speech act.
	www.ac.wwu.edu /~sngynan/slx12.html (1657 words)

	Description
		While the constative utterance offers a statement that describes or articulates "what is," the performative utterance produces, transforms, institutes.
		Austin for the most part located performative language within the realm of intentional consciousness and limited his analyses to instances of "relative purity," excluding citations of performative speech (e.g., those by "an actor in a play")—a position Derrida famously deconstructs.
		Nonetheless, Austin's lectures demonstrated that performative utterances collapse the distinction between saying and doing, severely problematizing the conception of language as a transcendental structure of meaning (what Saussure calls langue).
	www.cwrl.utexas.edu /~davis/crs/prhetorics/index.htm (256 words)

	[No title]
		By essential contrast >to (true/false) 'constative utterances', the functioning of the >performative is not to be conceived in terms of the communication >of a meaning-content that is oriented towards an assessment in >terms of truth (ibid, p.
		In the case of performatives >this involves situations in which the speaker is not putting >forward what is said with the intention to actually perform the >speech-act whose formula is being uttered.
		Every utterance in a natural lanuage, parasitic or not, is an instance of iterability, which is simply another way of saying that the type-token distinction applies to the elements of language." (ibid p206) Thus, according to Searle, Derrida has confused iterability, citationality and parasitism.
	www.cas.usf.edu /journal/logs/log9703.html (19300 words)

	performative
		Gould believes that Austin’s motivation for decoupling the performative from the true/false dichotomy was that he wanted to locate in language those regions in which we might find (or fail to find) relations to the world and its inhabitants, or to locate what Jacques Derrida regards as the “difference of force,” Gould reminds us.
		It is the “utterance of certain noises, the utterance of certain words in a certain construction, and the utterance of them with a certain ‘meaning’ in the favourite philosophical sense of that word, i.e.
		The performative is bound up with effects that are material, social, and historical.
	www.bgsu.edu /cconline/Thomas/performative.html (633 words)

	Pornography as a Performative Utterance
		He introduced the terms of performative utterances, locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts to the vocabulary of philosophers, in all areas of philosophy.
		This is the act of using an utterance; it is the performance of an act in saying something as opposed to the actual utterance.
		Given the results of the criticism of the definition of their pornography, it does not seem reasonable to conclude that pornography is in fact a performative utterance, fulfilling all the actions that Austin includes as necessary in a performative utterance.
	artsweb.uwaterloo.ca /~pthurley/index/Pornography.htm (3205 words)

	Leithart.com \| J. L. Austin, Deconstructionist?
		JL Austin famously distinguished between "performative" and "constative" utterances, the former of which perform the action to which they refer and the latter of which make assertions that can be judged as true or false.
		It is possible to make a performative utterance without explicitly stating the action you are doing: "I promise to pay you" is no different from "I will pay you." Both have the same illocutionary force.
		That being the case, it is possible to conceive the constative "The bench is wet" as a performative "I affirm that the bench is wet." The supplement of the performative, the extra sort of speech that is a performative, is seen as the true original; the hierarchy of constative and performative is disturbed and overturned.
	www.leithart.com /archives/001894.php (312 words)

	Michael Hancher: abstract of "Performative Utterance . . ." (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Abstract: "Performative Utterance, the Word of God, and the Death of the Author" (1988)
		The divine utterance Fiat lux seems to be the paradigmatic performative, the quintessential declarative speech act, akin to the declarative words of institution in the Eucharist; yet the concept of performative discourse figures prominently in Barthes's "counter-theological" model of Ècriture.
		Barthes's appropriation of speech-act theory (as interpreted by Benveniste) is doubly unfortunate: it betrays his project and it betrays the theory.
	mh.cla.umn.edu /abspuwgd.html (93 words)

	I hereby ask this, a question in the form of a performative utterance \| Ask MetaFilter
		I recently found out these are called "performative utterances"; the classic examples are firing someone by saying "You're fired", or getting married by saying "I do (take him/her to be my...)".
		Some examples of performatives include promising, apologizing, requesting, nominating, sentencing, commanding, etc. In most utterances where there is no sarcasm or misunderstanding, the illocution and perlocution will match, but the locution doesn't include the word(s) that describe the act.
		Performative utterances “[T]o utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not todescribe my doing of what I should be send in so uttering to be doing or tostate that I am doing it: it is to do it....
	ask.metafilter.com /mefi/16257 (4804 words)

	Performative Language in Renaissance Performance
		Acting is a word that has dual connotations: that of performing an action, as well as that of playing an action or a role.
		Language, particularly powerfully charged performative language, is often linked to authority, which was demonstrated earlier with regards to 1 Henry IV and Richard II.
		Queen Elizabeth was concerned about having a deposition staged in Richard II (Fitter 1); her discomfort about the power of actions performed with words onstage demonstrates the real effect of speech acts, even when fictionalized in theatre.
	www.chass.utoronto.ca /~cpercy/courses/6362-estill.htm (2682 words)

	Philosophy of Language - Final Exam Review
		In any context of utterance, the intension of "I" is a constant function from possible worlds to the agent of the context.
		Such a description should include the idea that a constative utterance is a "saying" whereas a performative utterance is a "doing"; the idea that the characteristic flaw of constatives is being false, whereas the characteristic flaw of performatives is being infelicitous.
		One problem, noted by Lycan: the reasoning involved in conversational implicatures involves a negative phase (the utterance violates a maxim, so the speaker must be trying to communicate something other than the literal meaning of the utterance) and a positive phase, in which one attempts to determine what the speaker is trying to communicate.
	www.trinity.edu /cbrown/language/finalquestionsS04.html (3769 words)

	Amazon.com: How to Do Things with Words: Second Edition (William James Lectures): Books: J. L. Austin,J. O. ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Austin's argument concerning the characteristics of a performative utterance are informed by a specific assumption concerning the origin and evolution of language: to wit, that language in its primitive stage was simply a collection of one-word utterances that are inherently ambiguous in terms of their individual senses.
		As a result, the clarity of a given utterance depends almost exclusively on the intention of the speaker; she must in some way remain cognizant of the above-mentioned threshold and therefore deploy the force of her utterance in a way that avoids being too diffuse or unmanageably polyvalent.
		This further implies that clarity of utterance is ultimately an ethical consideration, rather than a linguistic or grammatical one, because the speaker's responsibility to her addressee obliges her to be earnest and therefore quite literal in her expression (see Habermas on this point).
	www.amazon.com /How-Do-Things-Words-Lectures/dp/0674411528 (2038 words)

	John Austin on performative utterances
		the, leading incident in the performance of the act (of betting or what not), the performance of which is also the object of the utterance, but it is far from being usually, even if it is ever, the sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed.
		This is, though vague, true enough in general – it is an important commonplace in discussing the purport of any utterance whatsoever.
		Once we realize that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act.
	www.stanford.edu /class/ihum54/Austin_on_speech_acts.htm (437 words)

	John & Belle Have A Blog: How Not To Do Things With Words
		A hint of this occurs in his last chapter, when he describes an excuse as a performative utterance on the ground that its purpose is not to state but to convince.
		In addition, although performatives do make true something that was not true before the speech act occurred, they have nothing to do with denying reality -- there's a whole collection of social conventions underlying and guaranteeing the validity of the marriage ceremony, for instance.
		You're right that neither case is actually a performative, but that's the whole joke; both - the friendster rep and De Man - seem to me to be absurdly trying to perform non-performatives into performatives, summoningly impossible illocutionary force out of the very air.
	examinedlife.typepad.com /johnbelle/2004/07/how_not_to_do_t.html (1287 words)

	Standardization Revisited
		utterance is not (or is not sufficiently) truthful, plausible,
		Performatives are distinctive because they involve the use of the very
		performativity is but a special case of a more general phenomenon.
	online.sfsu.edu /~kbach/standard.html (3224 words)

	PostClassic:
		A term denoting inclusion in an artistic movement is a kind of performative utterance masquerading as a descriptive one.
		By coining an adjective that had the appearance of objectivity, Leroy was performing the act of commanding the reader to regard those artists as mistaken and insgnificant.
		And since naming a movement is a performative utterance, you can’t claim that calling ourselves totalists didn’t make us totalists.
	www.artsjournal.com /postclassic/2006/01/rules_of_the_word_game.html (3366 words)

	Questions #16:
		, what must be the case for a performative utterance to have its intended effect?
		K) What are reflexive and transitive performative acts?
		L) How do reflexive performative acts stand as the basis for the claim there is real moral wrong in the Bungle case?
	www.public.iastate.edu /~bbelknap/ptt3S06.html (574 words)

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