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

3. Conclusion Utterances like (4—5), although different from utterances like (1—3) in ways we have just discussed, share an important property with them: just as most normal utterances, they are not simply "issued out of speakers' heads" for no reason at all. They are issued with a communicative force or intention. When they are said, a speech act is performed: the speech act of making a statement. The so-called constative utterances are statements and as such they constitute a subclass of performatives. We no longer contrast constatives with performatives, because every utterance is a performative. We will say instead that statements are a subclass of speech acts along with other subclasses of speech acts, which include promises, threats, warnings, bets, orders, etc. It turns out that we must make a careful distinction between speech acts on the one hand and utterances on the other. The former are actions performed in issuing the latter and the latter are products of performing the former (cf. Szabolcsi 1983). In addition, we must distinguish both from sentences. The former are pragmatic categories and the latter is a syntactic category. A sentence may be characterized semantically by saying that it expresses a statement, which may be either true or false, but the question of truth or falsity cannot even be raised in connection with actions. 17