The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Locutionary act

Locutionary act: The utterance of a statement with a meaning; a type of speech act. Introducing the term in How to Do Things with Words (1962), British “ordinary-language” philosopher John L. Austin defined it as “an act of saying something” and characterized it as “roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to ’meaning’ in the traditional sense.”