3 Review(s)

This book critically analyses Austin’s speech act theory and comments on it raised by a number of distinguished philosophers. Initially, Austin argued for two sorts of utterances; the constative and the performative. Eventually, he shrugged off this distinction and advocated in favour of speech act theory, which is the theme of this book. Numerous other philosophers have conferred about the pros and cons of this doctrine. This book presents a position that in the perspectives of speaker’s intention, one may justify the distinction between the constative and the performative utterances. The author has argued that this discussion is trivial and he has raised a new issue of language, i.e. ‘how performatives work’ in varied socio-cultural conditions. In addition, the relations of intention with language and behaviour are also examined and leading to a conclusion that behaviour is the more appropriate device to judge the real intention of the speaker. This book is expected to be adopted as a supplementary text for master level course on Analytical Philosophy and it would be advantageous for the scholars of linguistics, communication and of great interest to the general readers.