A Study On Austin's Speech Act Theory

Austin is a distinguished representative of daily linguistic school. He spent his lifetime on the study of linguistic philosophy and obtained some achievements as follows. For one thing, he offered the new technology which is the new methodology for the analysis of language, called linguistic phenomenology. For another, on the basis of linguistic phenomenology, Austin put forward speech act theory. According to speech act theory, the performative utterance generally exists. Saying something is doing something. The development of speech act theory was divided into two phases. In the first stage, he discussed the differences between the performative utterance and the constative utterance. In the second stage, he negated the differences of these two kinds of utterances and proposed three kind of speech act theory. A complete speech act includes three behaviors, that is locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts.Speech act theory promotes the development of epistemology and linguistic philosophy, explores the relationship between the world and language from a new perspective and provides a new standard for discourse evaluation and enriches the content of semantic theory.Speech act theory proposed by Austin provides theoretical basis for Searle's indirect speech act theory. On the basis of Austin's research, Searle enriches and perfects speech act theory, making it more systematic and scientific. In addition, Austin's speech act theory lay the references for Hart's research of legal and create a new analysis school.