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Preferred term

speech acts  

Definition

  • The study of speech acts arose in part as a challenge to a dominant philosophical assumption that the primary purpose of language is to describe the world. In the middle of the 20th century, philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Peter Strawson, Paul Grice, Gilbert Ryle, and John Searle began to undermine that assumption by arguing that even a grammatically indicative sentence may be used for many other purposes besides description. [Source: Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences; Speech Acts]

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https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/speech_acts

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