Essay Sample on Austin Workbook Entry

Introduction

Austin's book title has been interpreted in a myriad of ways. Many readers understand the title and hence the author's intent to be; "to do things with to words", in the sense that words are to be used in some form of wordplay or rhetoric. Literature is a beautiful collection of creativity and pleasures connection of ideas and thoughts. Austin n this book generated numerous ways through which the audience can juggle their thoughts to incorporate the new and unique ways of communication in the literary context. In a real sense, the author's key intent is to make the reader understand that they can "make things happen by using words" or that they can, "use words to do something."

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Majority of the literature in the book focuses on exploring the varying uses of language seem to; by their very word, base an act. In Austin's view, an utterance usually does something. Speaking can inspire action and lead to the action taking by into consideration the audience's thought process. As per the author, if an individual says something, then the actual utterance is the 'promising'. The promising concept is able to inspire action and may make the audience to take action and do things that they had long held dear to their hearts and mind. The author continues to explain that in uttering something, the individual has made a promise, essentially, a promise to commit a certain act. The promise is or exists because the individual has 'uttered' something (Austin, 1975). The promise in this concept according to Austin is a way of commitment to action. The author adds that promising is a performative, well defined from conservatives such as the statement "there is a stone in my drink." The outlined statement has no promise but is rather a statement of circumstance/fact. The statement also is conclusive in a way, but inspires a feeling of action from the reader; to remove the stone so that you can take it. The recipient of this statement thus expects no actions to be done, based on the fact that the conservatives have no premise or promise of action.

To further describe his inferences on performatives, Austin begins with the initial misconstructions pertaining to this classification and allows the readers to follow their reasoning, however unfitting, to its conclusion (Austin, 1975). The reader gets to understand and interpret the information in their personal reasoning; the performatives is in a way initiated by Austin to ensure that there is a near perfect connection between the reader and the author as well as the text. We get to understand what was seemingly Austin's road to his concept of performatives, the author, seemingly trusting that the people reading his work will better comprehend the ending if one understands how one gets to the end from the inception.

The author seems aware that some of the readers of his book will want him or expect the book to jump straight into the jargon of the paper, using linguistic and psychological terms to illustrate and deliver the meaning of his words.

The author seems to want his readers to understand that the distinction between constative and performatives is really an illusion. As per Austin, all acts pertaining to an utterance can be categorized as either an illocutionary act; locutionary or perlocutionary act.

An illocutionary act is that which is defined by the contextual or relative function of the act for instance, by telling somebody to step back, you may be warning them of a falling object. This is very contextual, as the same utterance may mean that one wishes the recipient of the action to back away from them or in a literary sense, it may also mean telling someone to calm down. The second type of categorization, of locutionary acts, means that the meaning of the utterance is the meaning of the individual words combined or the explicit meaning of the statement. For instance, the meaning of the utterance "Step back" simply means that the recipient of the utterance should take a step back (Austin, 1975). The third classification is that of perlocutionary acts, which serves a mainly informative role, it has no premise or need for action from the communicator to the recipient. Austin describes perlocutionary acts/utterances as those intended to "alert" the recipient. In this particular instance, the phrase "Step back" is meant to let the recipient know the impending danger.

With this structure in place, Austin determines that every statement, excluding some limited exceptions, is actually an act, and that what most readers/people originally believed to be a "performative" is merely a verb that makes execution of an act explicit. Saying, "There is a stone in my drink," for instance, undoubtedly is a locutionary act.

The statement could be denoting a myriad of several illocutionary acts. For instance, the speaker may have been complaining of the drink, or he/she may have been berating the waiter, or he/she was describing the drink, or just passing a statement. It would have made no difference if the speaker had said, "I state that there is a stone in my drink." The utterance can also have a perlocutionary act: this is by saying, there was a stone in my drink, or I persuaded the waiter to bring me another glass of juice, for instance.

By finding almost all statements to act, Austin redefines some qualities of statements according to the explanations originally articulated when a constative/performative distinction was considered. Thereby a statement's attribute of either being "false" or "truth" does not stand for anything simplified/simplistic at all; but only for a broad aspect of being a proper or right thing to say contrary to an incorrect thing, in these situations, to this readership, for these reasons and with these aims (Austin, 1975). The author shows that false or true is really whether something was the appropriate thing to utter about a scenario, in regard to one's knowledge of the particulars and the aims for which the person is speaking.

Austin (1975) winds up by citing five groups of performatives, along with instances of each (151): The five classifications are; exercitives, commissives, verdictives expositive, behabitives.

Samples of exercitives include; exercise rights, powers, or influence (for instance, "warn" "appoint," or "advise,"). Samples of commissives include to commit one to do an action (for instance; "agree", "declare," or "promise,"). Verdictives include giving a judgment, such as by an umpire or a jury (for instance; to "rule", "grade," or "assess,"). Behabitives relate to social conduct (for instance; "challenge", "apologize", or "congratulate,"). Lastly, expositive serve to clarify how the statements fit in the setting (for instance; "illustrate", "reply", or "argue,").

References

J. L. Austin, John L. Austin (1975), How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge University Press, Massachusetts.