How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered in Harvard University in 1955 J. L. Austin (late White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, late White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford)
This work sets out Austin's conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts for at least the last ten years of his life. Starting from an exhaustive examination of his already well-known distinction between performative utterances and statements, Austin here finally abandons that distinction, replacing it with a more general theory of `illocutionary forces' of utterances which has important bearings on a wide variety of philosophical problems.