As the overview article showed, once the performative/constative distinction stalls, Austin moves in Lecture VIII toward a broader general theory. Rather than lean on surface cues of grammar and vocabulary, he goes back to a more basic question: how many kinds of act, really, are folded into a single utterance at once? Here we dig into how each of its three acts is actually defined, and where the boundaries between them start to blur.
1. The “locutionary act” is itself three layers deep
Austin first defines the most basic act, the “locutionary act,” as “the act of ‘saying something’ in this full normal sense.” But the locutionary act itself, he goes on, splits into three further sub-acts: the bare “phonetic act” of uttering noises; the “phatic act” of uttering them as words belonging to a particular vocabulary and grammar; and the “rhetic act” of uttering them with a definite sense and reference. Mimicking someone’s words in quotation marks — reproducing them phatically — is possible without reproducing the rhetic act at all: writing, in a novel, that “she said, ‘lovely hair’” only quotes the phatic act; it becomes a report at the rhetic level once it is recast as indirect speech — “he said that the cat was on the mat.” This three-way split looks like fussy hair-splitting at first, but it’s the foundation the rest of the theory stands on: only once “what was said” (the locutionary act) is fixed can we even ask “how it was said” (the illocutionary act).
2. The illocutionary act — separating force from meaning
Even once the locutionary act (what was said, its meaning) is settled, an entirely different question remains: how was it being used? As advice, a mere suggestion, an order?
I explained the performance of an act in this new and second sense as the performance of an ‘illocutionary’ act … I shall refer to the doctrine of the different types of function of language here in question as the doctrine of ‘illocutionary forces’.
(Japanese and English renderings of quotations throughout are ToL’s own.) Why bother coining a whole new word, “force”? Austin insists here on keeping meaning (sense and reference) sharply distinct from force. We’re tempted to say “he meant it as an order,” folding force into “meaning” — but “you’ll leave,” spoken with the same sense and reference every time, can be a warning, a prediction, or a threat: the meaning stays put while the force changes entirely. Conflate the two, Austin warns, and every difference of force gets smuggled in under the label “difference of meaning” — and the classification of force itself disappears from view.
The illocutionary act, moreover, involves convention — Austin is careful to note that “the illocutionary act is a conventional act: an act done as conforming to a convention.”
3. Perlocutionary acts — you can say “I argue” but not “I convince”
If the line between the locutionary and illocutionary act is already unsteady, the line between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary act looks unsteady too. But Austin offers a practical test for telling the two apart.
… the former may, for rough contrast, be said to be conventional, in the sense that at least it could be made explicit by the performative formula; but the latter could not. Thus we can say ‘I argue that’ or ‘I warn you that’ but we cannot say ‘I convince you that’ or ‘I alarm you that’.
Whether the act fits the “I hereby…” performative mold is a rough but genuinely useful test: illocutionary acts (arguing, warning) fit it; perlocutionary acts (convincing, alarming) don’t. The former is an act the speaker takes on; the latter is a result produced in the hearer.
4. Uses that aren’t in earnest — poetry and jokes
There’s a further layer that doesn’t sit neatly in any of the three categories. Austin points out that language also has “parasitic” uses that are “not serious,” not the “full normal use” — uses where the ordinary conditions of reference are suspended, or no standard perlocutionary act is even attempted. His example is a line of poetry: when Walt Whitman calls on the eagle of liberty to soar, he isn’t seriously trying to get an eagle to do anything. This is a “parasitic” use of language in which the perlocutionary act is deliberately suspended.
Other acts resist the scheme in a similar way. Insinuating something has no performative formula at all — you can’t ordinarily say “I hereby insinuate.” Swearing, as an oath rather than a curse, comes close to the same problem. Austin sets all of this — jokes, acting, poetry, insinuating, swearing — alongside each other as territory that doesn’t fit neatly into any of the three boxes, and leaves it candidly open for further work. The theory not claiming to cover everything is, if anything, a mark of its honesty.
Seen this way, the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts are less like three neatly separated boxes than three different questions you can ask of a single utterance: what was said, what was done in saying it, and what happened as a result.
Beyond the three acts
With meaning, force, and effect now pulled apart, Austin turns in his final lecture to classifying the illocutionary act on its own — into five families: verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives, and expositives. That is the last, and by his own admission least comfortable, piece of work — the subject of the next article.