Speech acts books
Speech acts books to start from. Open one to see books like it, or tell BookSense what you loved for four picks made for you.
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New to the genre? These 5 are the books to read first.
How to Do Things with Words
J. L. AustinThe founding text. Introduces performatives, the locutionary/illocutionary/perlocutionary distinction and felicity conditions.
Speech Acts
John R. SearleBuilds a systematic theory of speech acts on rules and constitutive conventions, and treats the illocutionary act as the basic unit of meaning.
Logic and Conversation
H. P. GriceSets out the cooperative principle and conversational maxims, and the idea of implicature, which explains how speakers mean more than they say.
Excitable Speech
Judith ButlerApplies speech act ideas to hate speech, censorship and the power of words to wound, and raises questions about the limits of the performative.
Expression and Meaning
John R. SearleA collection that extends the theory to indirect speech acts, metaphor and the relation between speaker meaning and sentence meaning.
Chosen and described with AI from our notes on the genre.
