Locutionary act is a fundamental concept in linguistics and the philosophy of language, introduced by the British philosopher J. L. Austin in his posthumously published work How To Do Things With Words (1962). It is one of the three dimensions of a speech act within Speech Act Theory, alongside the illocutionary act and the perlocutionary act.
Definition
A locutionary act is the basic act of producing a meaningful utterance. It refers to the sheer performance of saying something — the physical and linguistic act of uttering sounds, words, and sentences that carry a literal, semantic meaning. In Austin's framework, a speech act must be analyzed at three levels, the first of which is the locutionary act.
Subdivisions
Austin further divided the locutionary act into three concurrent sub-acts:
- Phonetic act – The act of producing specific vocal sounds (phonemes).
- Phatic act – The act of uttering words and phrases that conform to a given grammar and vocabulary (i.e., producing a grammatically well-formed string in a language).
- Rhetic act – The act of using those words with a specific sense and reference, thereby conveying a determinate propositional content.
Taken together, these three sub-acts constitute the full locutionary act: a meaningful linguistic expression independent of the speaker's intended force or effect.
Example
Consider the utterance "Don't do that!":
- Phonetic act: The speaker produces the specific sounds /doʊnt/ /duː/ /ðæt/.
- Phatic act: The speaker arranges these words into a grammatically correct English imperative sentence.
- Rhetic act: The speaker refers to a particular action (the thing the listener is doing or about to do) and predicates that it should not be performed.
The locutionary act is thus the utterance itself with its literal meaning. This is distinct from the illocutionary act (what the speaker is doing by saying it — e.g., warning, commanding, advising) and the perlocutionary act (the actual effect on the listener — e.g., causing the listener to stop).
Role in Speech Act Theory
The locutionary act provides the semantic and phonetic foundation upon which illocutionary force is built. Austin's key insight was that utterances are not merely statements that can be true or false (constatives), but are themselves actions (performatives). The locutionary act captures the "saying" dimension, while the illocutionary act captures the "doing" dimension of the same utterance.
Felicity Conditions
For a locutionary act to function properly as part of a successful speech act, certain felicity conditions must be met. These are divided into three categories:
- Preparatory conditions – The contextual prerequisites for the utterance to be appropriate.
- Sincerity conditions – The speaker must genuinely intend the act they are performing.
- Essential condition – The utterance counts as an act of a certain type under the conventions of the language.
References
- Austin, J. L. (1962). How To Do Things With Words. Oxford University Press.
- Green, Mitchell. "Speech Acts." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021).
- Searle, John R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press.
