In
linguistics and the
philosophy of mind, a
locutionary act is the performance of an
utterance, and hence of a
speech act. The term equally refers to the surface meaning of an utterance because, according to
J. L. Austin's posthumous "How To Do Things With Words", a speech act should be analysed as a locutionary act (
i.e. the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance), as well as an
illocutionary act (the semantic '
illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its real, intended meaning), and in certain cases a further
perlocutionary act (
i.e. its actual effect, whether intended or not).