Locutionary act
In linguistics and the philosophy of mind, a locutionary act is the performance of an utterance, and hence of a speech act. The term equally refers to the surface meaning of an utterance because, according to J. L. Austin's posthumous How To Do Things With Words, a speech act should be analysed as a locutionary act, as well as an illocutionary act, and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act.Example
For example, the phrase "Don't go into the water" counts as warning to the listener not to go into the water. If the listener heeds the warning the speech-act has been successful in persuading the listener not to go into the water. This taxonomy of speech acts was inherited by John R. Searle, Austin's pupil at Oxford and subsequently an influential exponent of speech act theory.
