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

it is to do it. None of these utterances cited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not argue it" (p. 6). (a) "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' (b) "I give and bequeath my Watch to my brother" (c) "I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow." (p. 5) It suggests that constative utterances are assumed to be familiar and the two types of utterances are defined in a mutually contrastive fashion with reference to each other: constative utterances are the ones that possess the negatively specified features of the performatives and do not posses their positively specified features and conversely. The idea may be diagrammed like this: Constative and (explicit) performative utterances Utterance type To say the utterance is to perform the speech act denoted by the verb May be true or false CONSTATIVE — + PERFORMATIVE (EXPLICIT) + — That is to say, a constative utterance is a description or statement of the action denoted by the verb but it is not the performance of that action, and a constative utterance may be true or false: "to issue a constative utterance ... is to make a statement. To issue a performative utterance is, for example, to make a bet" (p. 6, footnote 2). In the explication of the "doctrine of the Infelicities in Lectures II and III, Austin points out that an additional distinguishing property of performatives is that they are characterized by the set of conditions that must be met for each performative to be "happy" (p. 14) and by the ways in which a performative can "go wrong" or be "unhappy" (p. 18). It is important to bear in mind that the characterization of performatives is based on their distinction from the "supposedly familiar" (p. 20) constatives, which are assumed to typically go wrong by being false.