How to do things with Words. The William James Lectures delivered in Harvard University in 1955.
AUSTIN J.L. (1962.)
£250.00 [First Edition]
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Edited by J.O. Urmson. First edition. Small 8vo. vii, [3], 166, [2] pp. Original blue cloth, spine lettered and ruled in gilt, dust jacket (neat contemporary ownership inscription to front free endpaper, a few neat pencilled marginal annotations throughout, jacket rather edge worn, spine panel faintly toned with small loss to tips, notwithstanding a good copy). Oxford, At the Clarendon Press.
'Austin’s most influential work was his theory of speech acts outlined in lectures entitled ‘Words and deeds’, first given at Oxford in 1952 and delivered as the William James lectures (published as How to do Things with Words) at Harvard in 1955. Edited by J. O. Urmson, they were published in 1962 ... Here he distinguished between the kinds of acts one performs in uttering a sentence: the phonetic act of making certain noises, the phatic act of uttering certain grammatically well-structured words, the locutionary act of using a sentence with a given sense and reference, the illocutionary act performed in performing the locutionary act, for example stating, promising, describing, thanking, and the perlocutionary act which one may succeed in performing by performing the illocutionary act, for example deterring, inciting, persuading, misleading. Utterances may be further classified according to their illocutionary force into verdictives, such as estimating, convicting, exercitives, such as appointing, ordering, commissives, such as promising, guaranteeing, behabitives, such as apologising, congratulating, and expositives, such as replying, conceding. The elaborate typology was intended as a preliminary step in the development of a comprehensive theory of speech acts' (ODNB).
Stock Code: 245928
