Austin Speech Act Theory

John Langshaw Austin was a British philosopher of language as well as animportant contributor in analytic philosophy. The extraordinary achievement ofAustin's philosophy toward linguistics was his rigorous examination of the dailylanguage with the method of linguistic phenomenology. His thoughts on languagephilosophy were consisted by three parts, i.e. linguistic phenomenology, speech acttheory and case to case analysis on ordinary language philosophy. In this paper, wewould discuss the formation, details and applications of the above-said three parts inthe object of introducing Austin's thoughts on language philosophy comprehensivelyand critically.The simplest way associated with Austin's speech act theory is that speech isitself a form of action. Austin was better than the ordinary scholars because he linkedlanguage to human behavior as well as to the society. This study will be valuable inintroducing Austin's theory and also helping the study the daily language philosophy inChina.