Introduction to Illocutionary acts

This introductory book is about what people do with words. Discourse scholars, ever since the publication of Austin¿s How to do things with words in 1962, have been impressed and influenced by the simple, but groundbreaking idea that ¿meaning¿ is not only about ¿saying¿ but also about ¿doing¿. The communication acts which the speakers perform by saying things are technically referred to illocutionary acts (or speech acts). Examples of illocutionary acts are apologizing, promising, thanking and complimenting. This book is an initiation to the nature and use of illocutionary acts. This book highlights and tries to answer the questions which originally motivated the earliest attempts to speculate about illocutionary acts, namely what the writer calls the question of meaning- the question of how speeches come to be as meaningful as they sound.