What is it about?
Even if Austin's performative-constative distinction doesn't work with utterances, it does with approaches to the study of language. (I borrowed this notion from Shoshana Felman.) Radical rethinkings of Austin and Grice through Derrida, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and Peirce.
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Why is it important?
More than a decade after the publication of this book, it is becoming increasingly clear that the study of performativity in/of translation is hot--and scholars are referencing PL.
Perspectives
I first made this claim--that mainstream linguistics is constative, and what we really need is a performative linguistics, based on people doing things to others with words--in a job talk at the University of Tampere in the late 1980s, and then decided to turn it into a book in the late 1990s, in Spain. By the time it came out, in 2003, I was already beginning to worry that it would not get noticed, and for a long time my fears were grounded. In 2014 and 2015, however, John Milton and Dennitza Gabrakova and I organized a conference on performativity and translation and a session on the topic at IATIS, and the response was massive. It seemed everybody had read the book--or at least knew of it, and cited it.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Performative Linguistics, September 2003, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9780203222850.
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