J. L. Austin

Austin argued that saying something can also be doing something, such as promising, warning, naming, or apologizing. His lectures were published posthumously in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words.

A performative utterance is a sentence that performs an action when spoken in the right context. A classic example is saying I apologize, where the utterance itself can count as the act of apologizing.

Austin was a central Oxford figure in ordinary language philosophy, which studied how words function in everyday use rather than in idealized logic alone. This put him near philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle and, in a broader tradition, the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Austin separated the act of saying words, the act performed in saying them, and the effects produced by saying them. In his vocabulary, those are locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts.