illocutionary act: a standalone construct

J. L. Austin introduced the illocutionary act in his 1962 William James Lectures, published as How to Do Things with Words, to name what a speaker does in the act of saying something: promising, warning, asserting, ordering, apologising, and the like. He set it against two neighbours: the locutionary act, which is simply uttering meaningful words, and the perlocutionary act, which is the effect the utterance produces in a hearer, such as persuading or alarming them. John Searle systematised the idea in his 1969 book Speech Acts, treating an illocutionary act as governed by conventional rules and analysable into its illocutionary point together with conditions such as the speaker's sincerity and authority. What makes the construct a landmark is its claim that language is a form of action rather than only a description of the world, so that an utterance carries an illocutionary force, the specific kind of act it counts as, which can be studied apart from both the words used and the results obtained. As a separate cross-reference, the plain word illocution is used only in this technical, speech-act meaning and has no common non-academic homonym.[1][2][3]

Unit

A single communicative act performed in uttering something, classified by its illocutionary force

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by analysing an utterance in context for its illocutionary point and the felicity conditions (speaker intention, sincerity, and authority) that a given force requires, following the taxonomies of Austin and Searle