Constructive Speech-Act Theory

Abstract

More than thirty years have passed since the publication of Austin’s How to do things with words, and the theory of speech acts which has been founded by him has since become established as an autonomous and elaborate sub-discipline of linguistics. From a semantic point of view this is due to the fact that speech-act theory deals with important aspects of the use of language which other theories of meaning — in particular, model theoretic semantics — either ignore or deal with only in marginal places.