How to Do Things with Words by J. L. Austin The Harvard University Lectures that Turned Language into Action
What's it about?
How to Do Things with Words (1962) starts from a simple insight with far-reaching consequences: speaking is a way of acting in the world. It shows us how promises, apologies, and declarations quietly shape social reality every day. This is the kind of mind-expanding work that just might change your relationship with language.
Most of us move through the day talking without giving language much thought. We make promises, issue warnings, offer apologies, and settle disagreements, all with a few well-chosen words. But J. L. Austin wanted to be clearer about what exactly happens when we speak. He wanted to break free from some of the old philosophical understandings that tied language and statements to being strictly about exchanging ideas and information. As the title suggests, How to Do Things with Words shows how words are more than that – they’re woven into action, authority, and social life.
This is an unusual book in that it is made up of 12 lectures that the author had given. In these talks, he invited listeners to slow down and notice the hidden work language is doing all the time. A sentence can commit someone to the future, alter a relationship, or change what counts as acceptable behavior, often in an instant.
This lesson provides a guided tour of speech as a form of doing – a way of acting in the world that quietly shapes reality every time someone opens their mouth.
Let’s start with a deceptively tricky question: What’s the purpose of a statement? For a long, long time, philosophers treated statements, utterances, and sentences as if their main job were to describe the world. You say something, and all that’s left for the listener to decide is whether it’s true or false. This way of thinking about language seemed so natural that it went unquestioned for ages. But Austin saw some big gaps in this very generalized framework.
For example, there’s a class of everyday utterances that don’t fit comfortably into the true-or-false mold. When someone says, “I bet you a dollar it’ll rain tomorrow.” Or they take a wedding oath and say, “I do.” Or they break a bottle of champagne against a boat and say, “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.” Or when they simply apologize or make a promise, something happens in the very act of speaking. The words themselves are carrying out the deed.
In other words, we can think of these utterances as performative. Rather than reporting facts, performative utterances operate more like moves in a game. Saying the words counts as making the move, provided the situation is right. In these cases, we shift our attention away from abstract meanings and toward real-world circumstances – who’s speaking, when they’re speaking, and under what conditions.
These are not one in a blue moon oddities; they show up constantly in ordinary life. A promise creates an obligation. A verdict settles a dispute. A greeting opens a social exchange.
But the funny thing is, once you start to recognize the performative aspect of language, you start to recognize it in less obvious places. Many utterances without explicit performative verbs still function in similar ways. A sentence that looks descriptive on the surface can carry commitments, expectations, or authority, depending on how and where it’s said. So, maybe performatives aren’t such a sharply defined class. Rather, they can connect to a wider field of utterances that also do things, even when they don’t announce that fact directly.
Take the statement, “You’ll be here tomorrow.” Maybe it doesn’t sound performative at first glance. But if this was said by a supervisor to their employee at the end of a tense meeting, then it takes on a certain forcefulness.
The action of language doesn’t belong to a special corner of speech, but flows through everyday statements in subtle and variable ways. This is the groundwork that we’ll be building on: to think about the act of speech as layered, flexible, and deeply tied to use rather than form alone. To recognize speaking is a kind of doing, where meaning lives not just in words, but in actions carried out through them.
Now, once words are seen as actions, a new question comes into view: What has to go right for those actions to succeed? That question leads directly into the next section.
Let’s shift the spotlight for a minute and put aside what certain utterances do and look instead at how they manage to do anything at all. Once words are understood as actions, it becomes natural to ask what makes those actions succeed, falter, or fall flat. In a way, this is the invisible framework that supports speech in everyday life.
The first thing to recognize is that performative utterances depend on shared conventions – or certain things we all agree on. A promise works because we all agree about what it means to make a promise. A verdict delivered in a courtroom carries weight because the judge occupies a recognized role in our society. Because of these shared conventions, language is woven into social practices long before anyone opens their mouth. Speaking is therefore a way of stepping into those practices and activating them. In this sense, we could even call them speech acts.
Now, Austin has another term to make sense of this – he calls them felicity conditions. These are the background requirements that allow a speech act to come off successfully. The right person has to speak, in the right circumstances, following the accepted procedures. When those conditions are met, the words do their job.
When they aren’t, something interesting happens.
There are many ways speech acts can go wrong. Some attempts misfire entirely – a wedding declared by the wrong person, a bet made without agreement. You may have heard someone who’s just going through the motions – the words feel hollow, and you know they have no intention of keeping their promise. These failures are revealing, because they show how much depends on intention, authority, and context. The words themselves are only part of the story.
These examples show how language is a coordinated social activity. Successful speaking requires alignment between speaker, listener, situation, and convention. Even sincerity becomes more than just a private feeling. It’s part of the mechanism, something the practice itself depends on.
Language is delicate and impressive at the same time. Delicate, because small cracks in context can derail an utterance. Impressive, because words routinely accomplish complex social tasks with remarkable efficiency.
In the next section, we’ll follow this thread into a deeper reconsideration of the kind of categories we can and can’t put language in.
Performative utterances have revealed how speaking can count as acting, and felicity conditions have shown how tightly those actions are tied to social settings. Now let’s turn back to the question of how we identify performative statements, and look at everything with fresh eyes.
We already used the example of your boss saying, “You’ll be here tomorrow.” But there are a lot of ordinary statements that can look like plain descriptions but behave in surprisingly performative ways.
If someone says, “I believe it’s raining,” this can also be performative since the speaker is committing themselves to a position. Likewise, saying “I warn you” and “It’s dangerous” can function in similar ways, depending on the context. The difference often lies less in grammar and more in how the utterance is used.
It becomes impossible to sort sentences into rigid types. Instead, we have to pay attention to what speakers are doing with their words in particular situations. Statements that once seemed purely factual now appear embedded in acts of asserting, conceding, advising, or insisting. Even stating a truth can be bound up with acts of declaration, checking, and standing behind claims.
The meaning of our words live in how we use them. Words gather their force from the roles they play in interaction, from the expectations they trigger, and from the commitments they create. This doesn’t take away the importance of facts or descriptions. Rather, it places them inside a richer landscape of speech acts. Almost every utterance can carry an action along with it, shaping the social world as it unfolds.
With that in mind, let’s move on to a more systematic way of describing what happens whenever anyone speaks. In the next section we’ll look at a framework that brings clarity to this expanding view – a way of naming the multiple layers of action packed into even the simplest sentence.
At this point, we’ve questioned familiar categories and widened the idea of action in language. So now’s the time to introduce a framework that helps organize what has been coming into view all along. Whenever someone speaks, we can see how several different kinds of action are taking place at once.
The first layer is the locutionary act. This is the act of producing meaningful sounds or marks – choosing words, following grammar, and saying something that can be understood. It covers vocabulary, syntax, and reference. In everyday terms, it’s the level at which a sentence has a recognizable meaning and can be paraphrased or translated.
The second layer is the illocutionary act, and this is where our focus can really settle. Here, the question is what the speaker is doing in speaking. Are they asserting, warning, promising, requesting, or advising? This is the force of the utterance – the social move it makes. Two sentences with the same wording can carry very different illocutionary force depending on tone, context, and situation.
The third layer is the perlocutionary act. This concerns what happens as a result of the utterance. A warning might frighten someone. An argument might persuade. A compliment might encourage. These effects matter, but they aren’t fully under the speaker’s control. They depend on how the listener responds.
Here’s an example of one sentence and how it can be interpreted through all three layers.
Someone says, “The door is open.” At the locutionary level, the sentence has a clear structure, refers to a specific door, and conveys a straightforward meaning that could easily be translated into another language.
Now if that same sentence is spoken by a teacher, the next level of the illocutionary act – the level of force – means that it functions as a warning or a request to close it, even though the wording hasn’t changed.
So, what’s the perlocutionary act – or the level of effect? Well, hearing “The door is open,” a student gets up and shuts it, feeling slightly embarrassed for not noticing sooner. That reaction – the action taken and the feeling produced – belongs to the perlocutionary level and depends on how the listener takes the utterance.
With this three part model, you can capture the richness of ordinary communication without flattening it into a single function. A simple sentence can state a fact, perform an action, and produce an effect, all at the same time. Austin’s framework gives names to these overlapping dimensions and makes it easier to see how they interact.
The next step involves looking more closely at the different kinds of illocutionary acts people perform every day, and asking how they might be grouped and compared. That exploration will carry us into the final section.
With a sturdy framework in place, it’s time to take things a step further and perhaps get a little more ambitious. If speaking always involves illocutionary force, then it becomes tempting to ask what kinds of forces there are. So let’s look at a rough map of the different actions people perform when they speak.
Austin proposes several broad categories of illocutionary acts, each capturing a familiar way language operates in social life.
To kick things off, there’s verdictives. As you might guess from the name, these are the kind of statements that deliver verdicts, judgments, or assessments, often tied to evidence or authority. “Based on the evidence, I find the defendant not guilty,” would be a prime example.
Another category of illocutionary acts are exercitives. These involve decisions, permissions, or commands – the exercise of power or influence – such as the CEO saying, “You may begin the meeting now.”
Then there are commissives, which commit the speaker to future action, as in promises or pledges. Telling your friend, “I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know,” is an everyday example.
A fourth category of illocutionary force belongs to behabitives, which cover social gestures like apologizing, congratulating, or thanking. “I’m sorry for interrupting you earlier,” is a common kind of behabitive statement.
Finally, there are expositives, which help organize discussion itself, clarifying how words fit into arguments, explanations, or debates. You might tack one of these on to the end of another statement by saying something like, “To clarify my point, I’m using ‘freedom’ in a legal sense, not a political one.”
Now, in some cases, depending on the situation, a statement could fit more than one group. Others might resist classification altogether.
For example, if someone says, “I stand by this decision, and I’ll take responsibility if it goes wrong.” In one breath, the speaker is delivering a judgment about the decision, committing themselves to future accountability, and offering reassurance to those affected. The sentence doesn’t sit neatly in a single category.
But don’t think of these as problems to be solved. It’s best to see it as a feature, not a bug. It shows that language is an activity shaped by human purposes, not a system waiting to be perfectly cataloged. The purpose of even attempting to classify speech acts is only to help sharpen our attention to the variety of things people accomplish with words and to pay attention to how different contexts and situations can alter the purpose of a statement.
The aim isn’t to capture language in a single theory, but to understand its moving parts well enough to see how they work together. Everyday conversations begin to look different once words are heard as actions unfolding in time, creating obligations, permissions, and expectations.
So don’t worry so much about the terminology. Instead, think about listening differently – and paying attention to what people are doing, not just what they are saying, every time words are put to use.
The main takeaway of this lesson to How to Do Things with Words by J. L. Austin is that with a small shift in perspective we can begin to change how we notice and understand language.
It starts by recognizing that everyday speaking is a form of action. Promises, warnings, apologies, verdicts, and explanations all show how words participate in social life by creating commitments, shaping expectations, and coordinating behavior.
The meaning of what we are saying emerges not only from vocabulary and grammar, but from context, convention, and the recognizable moves people make when we speak. Recognizing performative aspects of our words, as well as the felicity conditions, and the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts can sharpen our awareness of how communication actually works.
The lasting takeaway is a habit of attention: listening for what words are doing in real situations, and recognizing how much of social reality is built, maintained, and adjusted through speech itself.
Locution: That’s the end. Illocution: Please leave a rating. Perlocution: You feel inclined to. Now, go forth and do things with words.
How to Do Things with Words (1962) starts from a simple insight with far-reaching consequences: speaking is a way of acting in the world. It shows us how promises, apologies, and declarations quietly shape social reality every day. This is the kind of mind-expanding work that just might change your relationship with language.
Most of us move through the day talking without giving language much thought. We make promises, issue warnings, offer apologies, and settle disagreements, all with a few well-chosen words. But J. L. Austin wanted to be clearer about what exactly happens when we speak. He wanted to break free from some of the old philosophical understandings that tied language and statements to being strictly about exchanging ideas and information. As the title suggests, How to Do Things with Words shows how words are more than that – they’re woven into action, authority, and social life.
This is an unusual book in that it is made up of 12 lectures that the author had given. In these talks, he invited listeners to slow down and notice the hidden work language is doing all the time. A sentence can commit someone to the future, alter a relationship, or change what counts as acceptable behavior, often in an instant.
This lesson provides a guided tour of speech as a form of doing – a way of acting in the world that quietly shapes reality every time someone opens their mouth.
Let’s start with a deceptively tricky question: What’s the purpose of a statement? For a long, long time, philosophers treated statements, utterances, and sentences as if their main job were to describe the world. You say something, and all that’s left for the listener to decide is whether it’s true or false. This way of thinking about language seemed so natural that it went unquestioned for ages. But Austin saw some big gaps in this very generalized framework.
For example, there’s a class of everyday utterances that don’t fit comfortably into the true-or-false mold. When someone says, “I bet you a dollar it’ll rain tomorrow.” Or they take a wedding oath and say, “I do.” Or they break a bottle of champagne against a boat and say, “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.” Or when they simply apologize or make a promise, something happens in the very act of speaking. The words themselves are carrying out the deed.
In other words, we can think of these utterances as performative. Rather than reporting facts, performative utterances operate more like moves in a game. Saying the words counts as making the move, provided the situation is right. In these cases, we shift our attention away from abstract meanings and toward real-world circumstances – who’s speaking, when they’re speaking, and under what conditions.
These are not one in a blue moon oddities; they show up constantly in ordinary life. A promise creates an obligation. A verdict settles a dispute. A greeting opens a social exchange.
But the funny thing is, once you start to recognize the performative aspect of language, you start to recognize it in less obvious places. Many utterances without explicit performative verbs still function in similar ways. A sentence that looks descriptive on the surface can carry commitments, expectations, or authority, depending on how and where it’s said. So, maybe performatives aren’t such a sharply defined class. Rather, they can connect to a wider field of utterances that also do things, even when they don’t announce that fact directly.
Take the statement, “You’ll be here tomorrow.” Maybe it doesn’t sound performative at first glance. But if this was said by a supervisor to their employee at the end of a tense meeting, then it takes on a certain forcefulness.
The action of language doesn’t belong to a special corner of speech, but flows through everyday statements in subtle and variable ways. This is the groundwork that we’ll be building on: to think about the act of speech as layered, flexible, and deeply tied to use rather than form alone. To recognize speaking is a kind of doing, where meaning lives not just in words, but in actions carried out through them.
Now, once words are seen as actions, a new question comes into view: What has to go right for those actions to succeed? That question leads directly into the next section.
Let’s shift the spotlight for a minute and put aside what certain utterances do and look instead at how they manage to do anything at all. Once words are understood as actions, it becomes natural to ask what makes those actions succeed, falter, or fall flat. In a way, this is the invisible framework that supports speech in everyday life.
The first thing to recognize is that performative utterances depend on shared conventions – or certain things we all agree on. A promise works because we all agree about what it means to make a promise. A verdict delivered in a courtroom carries weight because the judge occupies a recognized role in our society. Because of these shared conventions, language is woven into social practices long before anyone opens their mouth. Speaking is therefore a way of stepping into those practices and activating them. In this sense, we could even call them speech acts.
Now, Austin has another term to make sense of this – he calls them felicity conditions. These are the background requirements that allow a speech act to come off successfully. The right person has to speak, in the right circumstances, following the accepted procedures. When those conditions are met, the words do their job.
When they aren’t, something interesting happens.
There are many ways speech acts can go wrong. Some attempts misfire entirely – a wedding declared by the wrong person, a bet made without agreement. You may have heard someone who’s just going through the motions – the words feel hollow, and you know they have no intention of keeping their promise. These failures are revealing, because they show how much depends on intention, authority, and context. The words themselves are only part of the story.
These examples show how language is a coordinated social activity. Successful speaking requires alignment between speaker, listener, situation, and convention. Even sincerity becomes more than just a private feeling. It’s part of the mechanism, something the practice itself depends on.
Language is delicate and impressive at the same time. Delicate, because small cracks in context can derail an utterance. Impressive, because words routinely accomplish complex social tasks with remarkable efficiency.
In the next section, we’ll follow this thread into a deeper reconsideration of the kind of categories we can and can’t put language in.
Performative utterances have revealed how speaking can count as acting, and felicity conditions have shown how tightly those actions are tied to social settings. Now let’s turn back to the question of how we identify performative statements, and look at everything with fresh eyes.
We already used the example of your boss saying, “You’ll be here tomorrow.” But there are a lot of ordinary statements that can look like plain descriptions but behave in surprisingly performative ways.
If someone says, “I believe it’s raining,” this can also be performative since the speaker is committing themselves to a position. Likewise, saying “I warn you” and “It’s dangerous” can function in similar ways, depending on the context. The difference often lies less in grammar and more in how the utterance is used.
It becomes impossible to sort sentences into rigid types. Instead, we have to pay attention to what speakers are doing with their words in particular situations. Statements that once seemed purely factual now appear embedded in acts of asserting, conceding, advising, or insisting. Even stating a truth can be bound up with acts of declaration, checking, and standing behind claims.
The meaning of our words live in how we use them. Words gather their force from the roles they play in interaction, from the expectations they trigger, and from the commitments they create. This doesn’t take away the importance of facts or descriptions. Rather, it places them inside a richer landscape of speech acts. Almost every utterance can carry an action along with it, shaping the social world as it unfolds.
With that in mind, let’s move on to a more systematic way of describing what happens whenever anyone speaks. In the next section we’ll look at a framework that brings clarity to this expanding view – a way of naming the multiple layers of action packed into even the simplest sentence.
At this point, we’ve questioned familiar categories and widened the idea of action in language. So now’s the time to introduce a framework that helps organize what has been coming into view all along. Whenever someone speaks, we can see how several different kinds of action are taking place at once.
The first layer is the locutionary act. This is the act of producing meaningful sounds or marks – choosing words, following grammar, and saying something that can be understood. It covers vocabulary, syntax, and reference. In everyday terms, it’s the level at which a sentence has a recognizable meaning and can be paraphrased or translated.
The second layer is the illocutionary act, and this is where our focus can really settle. Here, the question is what the speaker is doing in speaking. Are they asserting, warning, promising, requesting, or advising? This is the force of the utterance – the social move it makes. Two sentences with the same wording can carry very different illocutionary force depending on tone, context, and situation.
The third layer is the perlocutionary act. This concerns what happens as a result of the utterance. A warning might frighten someone. An argument might persuade. A compliment might encourage. These effects matter, but they aren’t fully under the speaker’s control. They depend on how the listener responds.
Here’s an example of one sentence and how it can be interpreted through all three layers.
Someone says, “The door is open.” At the locutionary level, the sentence has a clear structure, refers to a specific door, and conveys a straightforward meaning that could easily be translated into another language.
Now if that same sentence is spoken by a teacher, the next level of the illocutionary act – the level of force – means that it functions as a warning or a request to close it, even though the wording hasn’t changed.
So, what’s the perlocutionary act – or the level of effect? Well, hearing “The door is open,” a student gets up and shuts it, feeling slightly embarrassed for not noticing sooner. That reaction – the action taken and the feeling produced – belongs to the perlocutionary level and depends on how the listener takes the utterance.
With this three part model, you can capture the richness of ordinary communication without flattening it into a single function. A simple sentence can state a fact, perform an action, and produce an effect, all at the same time. Austin’s framework gives names to these overlapping dimensions and makes it easier to see how they interact.
The next step involves looking more closely at the different kinds of illocutionary acts people perform every day, and asking how they might be grouped and compared. That exploration will carry us into the final section.
With a sturdy framework in place, it’s time to take things a step further and perhaps get a little more ambitious. If speaking always involves illocutionary force, then it becomes tempting to ask what kinds of forces there are. So let’s look at a rough map of the different actions people perform when they speak.
Austin proposes several broad categories of illocutionary acts, each capturing a familiar way language operates in social life.
To kick things off, there’s verdictives. As you might guess from the name, these are the kind of statements that deliver verdicts, judgments, or assessments, often tied to evidence or authority. “Based on the evidence, I find the defendant not guilty,” would be a prime example.
Another category of illocutionary acts are exercitives. These involve decisions, permissions, or commands – the exercise of power or influence – such as the CEO saying, “You may begin the meeting now.”
Then there are commissives, which commit the speaker to future action, as in promises or pledges. Telling your friend, “I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know,” is an everyday example.
A fourth category of illocutionary force belongs to behabitives, which cover social gestures like apologizing, congratulating, or thanking. “I’m sorry for interrupting you earlier,” is a common kind of behabitive statement.
Finally, there are expositives, which help organize discussion itself, clarifying how words fit into arguments, explanations, or debates. You might tack one of these on to the end of another statement by saying something like, “To clarify my point, I’m using ‘freedom’ in a legal sense, not a political one.”
Now, in some cases, depending on the situation, a statement could fit more than one group. Others might resist classification altogether.
For example, if someone says, “I stand by this decision, and I’ll take responsibility if it goes wrong.” In one breath, the speaker is delivering a judgment about the decision, committing themselves to future accountability, and offering reassurance to those affected. The sentence doesn’t sit neatly in a single category.
But don’t think of these as problems to be solved. It’s best to see it as a feature, not a bug. It shows that language is an activity shaped by human purposes, not a system waiting to be perfectly cataloged. The purpose of even attempting to classify speech acts is only to help sharpen our attention to the variety of things people accomplish with words and to pay attention to how different contexts and situations can alter the purpose of a statement.
The aim isn’t to capture language in a single theory, but to understand its moving parts well enough to see how they work together. Everyday conversations begin to look different once words are heard as actions unfolding in time, creating obligations, permissions, and expectations.
So don’t worry so much about the terminology. Instead, think about listening differently – and paying attention to what people are doing, not just what they are saying, every time words are put to use.
The main takeaway of this lesson to How to Do Things with Words by J. L. Austin is that with a small shift in perspective we can begin to change how we notice and understand language.
It starts by recognizing that everyday speaking is a form of action. Promises, warnings, apologies, verdicts, and explanations all show how words participate in social life by creating commitments, shaping expectations, and coordinating behavior.
The meaning of what we are saying emerges not only from vocabulary and grammar, but from context, convention, and the recognizable moves people make when we speak. Recognizing performative aspects of our words, as well as the felicity conditions, and the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts can sharpen our awareness of how communication actually works.
The lasting takeaway is a habit of attention: listening for what words are doing in real situations, and recognizing how much of social reality is built, maintained, and adjusted through speech itself.
Locution: That’s the end. Illocution: Please leave a rating. Perlocution: You feel inclined to. Now, go forth and do things with words.
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