The Origins Of speech Acts

In his lectures, How to do things with words, Austin says that most philosophers were obsessed by the word "good", and tried to find the way it is used within a certain context. In other words, they tried to find out how the speaker uses it to make the other party perform a certain action in a certain situation. They found that it is almost used to reflect an "approval", "commending", or "grading". However we would not be able to realize the real intention behind using this word unless we sort those illocutionary acts related to "commending", and "grading". Springing from here, Austin has begun to work on the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts to form an overall theory that is known as the theory of speech acts .This theory is rooted in Pragmatics which, in its turn, seeks the real intention behind uttered words (Parkinson 166). Thus Austin was the first linguist to investigate the way we do things by the use of bits of words. His theory has found its way through the whole world of linguistics. Linguists started to react whether with or against his theory. Sometimes they add to it certain details, or argue against his use of other details. One of those linguists was John R. Searle