Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Csaba Czeglédi: On Constative and Performative Utterances

CSABA CZEGLÉDI ON CONSTATIVE AND PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES In this article I discuss a problem that arises from a basic distinction in Speech Act Theory (SAT) as developed in Austin (1962 and 1975) between the categories introduced in the title. I will show that constative utterances as such do not exist, that the performative

—constative distinction in its original form is false, but that the validity of the linguistic observations which motivated the distinction is regained by slightly modifying the theory, and that those observations will be interpretable within the framework of the theory without any detriment to its descriptive power or its general principles. First I will briefly discuss the speech-act theoretical apparatus that will be used. 1. SAT as a theory of verbal behavior 1.1 Speech acts and the nature of their rules In SAT verbal communication is interpreted as a type of rulegoverned human behavior. From the perspective of SAT "speaking a language is a matter of performing speech acts according to systems of constitutive rules" (cf. Searle 1969: 38). The speech act, the fundamental unit of verbal communication, is the central category of the theory. A speech act is the action that is performed in saying an utterance. The particular kind of action performed can be characterized in terms of the consequences that are believed to exist 9