Speech Acts By J.L. Austin

                            

In speech acts, J.L Austin has a theory about the performative acts in which a person is not just saying something but it is actually doing something if certain real world conditions are met. He pointed out that perforamtives should met felicity conditions in order to be successful. A conventional procedures,  all participants must execute the procedures, and finally the necessary thoughts, feelings, and intentions must be present in all parties. Austin devides performatives into five categories; verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives, and expositives.

On the other side, Searle argued that we can speak minimally at three kinds of acts. There are utterance acts which refers to the fact that we must utter words and sentences when we want to say anything at all, prepositional acts which refers to those matters that have to do with referring and predicitng, and illocutionary acts which refers to the intents of the speakers. As the additinon, Searle also regulates some rules in governing promise-making. Those are the propositional content, preparatory rules, sincerity rules and the essential rules.

In oppose to Austin, who concentrate his study on how the speakers realize their intentions in speaking, Searle focuses on how listeners respond to the utterances. Both Austin and Searle recognize that the people use language to achieve the variety of objectives.