A speech act is an action performed by means of language, such as describing something ("It is snowing."), asking a question ("Is it snowing?"), making a request or order ("Could you pass the salt?", "Drop your weapon or I'll shoot you!"), or making a promise ("I promise I'll give it back.")
For much of the history of linguistics and the philosophy of language, language was viewed primarily as a way of making factual assertions, and the other uses of language tended to be ignored. The work of J. L. Austin led philosophers to pay more attention to the way in which language is used in everyday activities. His student John Searle further developed this approach. However, the first systematic and comprehensive work on speech acts had already been done long before by the phenomenologistAdolf Reinach in 1913.
Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. An interesting type of illocutionary speech acts are performatives, which are expressions such as "I nominate John to be President.", "I sentence you to ten years imprisonment." or "I promise to pay you back.". In these expressions, the action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing, promising) is performed by the sentence itself; the speech is the act it effects. In contrast perlocutionary speech acts cause actions that are not the same as the speech.
The study of speech acts forms part of the discipline of pragmatics, which forms part of linguistics.
Moreover, almost any speechact is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience.
The theory of speechacts is partly taxonomic and partly explanatory.
Speechacts, being perlocutionary as well as illocutionary, generally have some ulterior purpose, but they are distinguished primarily by their illocutionary type, such as asserting, requesting, promising and apologizing, which in turn are distinguished by the type of attitude expressed.
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