Who said that and what does that mean?

Abstract

In this thesis, I reflect critically on the current debate on illocutionary acts in the speech act discourse. J.L. Austin spoke extensively and wrote less extensively on speech acts. This conceptual groundwork helps us understand what it means to ‘mean a certain proposition in an utterance’. I argue that a collectivist theory is more theoretically plausible when looking at ordinary language data. Individualist approaches seem to lack in this regard; the collectivist approach is able to account for more data in ordinary language use, for example, that in some cases illocutionary force seems to be the outcome of a joint effort by two participants.