ENTRY 3: SPEECH ACTS - Colleen Glenney Boggs

Linguist J.L. Austin divides words into two categories: CONSTATIVE: words that describe a situation. PERFORMATIVE: words that incite action. He describes how these categorizations give power to words and to your actions.He defines "the speech act" as an action performed by a speaker with the utterance, and this action includes terms such "ordering" "promising" "apologizing" "warning" etc. Performative words should follow "Felicity Conditions", which are: To be AUTHORITATIVE, UNDERSTOOD, CLEAR, and ABLE TO BE EXECUTED.

 http://ed.ted.com/lessons/speech-acts-constative-and-performative-colleen-glenney-boggs#review