Teorija govornog čina i književnost
Speech Act Theory and Literature

Summary/Abstract: In the period immediately after the First World War language (Saussure and followers) and many literary (Russian Formalists, Prague School, American New Critics) studies concentrated on special, restricted, decontextualized language with more emphasis on structure than meaning. Austin's (also the later Wittgenstein's) approach was the direct opposite. He believed that utterances perform actions when uttered by the appropriate person(s) in the appropriate circumstances. This he called the total speech act in the total speech situation. He provided five large functional categories (in 1973 redefined by Searle) for such acts which are realized through the simultaneously performed triad locution/illocution/perlocution. His work is now the basis for scholars in varied fields of social studies (philosophy, pragmatics, semantics, social anthropology, discourse analysis, text linguistics). Scholars concerned with literary interpretation take Austin's and later speech act studies into account in consideration of the interaction between writer / text/ reader.

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