How to Do Things
with Words

THE BOOK THAT FOUNDED SPEECH-ACT THEORY. Copyright 1962 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; first published as an Oxford University Press paperback by arrangement with Harvard, 1965; THIS REPRINT, 1968. The editor’s preface explains the provenance: these are the WILLIAM JAMES LECTURES delivered at Harvard in 1955, from notes Austin had been developing since 1939 and lecturing on at Oxford under the title “Words and Deeds”; he never published them himself, and they are printed “as exactly as possible and with the lightest editing”. Performatives, illocution and perlocution all enter the discipline here.