In this chapter, we think about the different things that we do when we produce utterances. Communication is not only about the exchange of information. We also perform acts and, in some cases, change the world when we speak, sign, or write. Speech act theory emerged as a means of understanding and analysing the things we do when we use language. We track the development of speech act theory, focusing on the work of two influential thinkers in the field: Austin and Searle. We begin by looking at what Austin called performatives and discuss how their meaning can be understood in terms of felicity conditions. We then move on to explore Austin’s distinction between locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts. John R. Searle’s work responds to and develops the work of Austin. He identifies four categories of felicity condition and uses these to propose a classification system for illocutionary acts. We consider Searle’s discussion of indirect speech acts as a key contribution to speech act theory and pragmatics more widely. The chapter ends with a brief overview of how speech act theory has been applied and developed since the work of Austin and Searle.

Chapter 17 aims to give an integrated account of how subjectivity and intersubjectivity are coded in Korean sentence endings, how such suffixes are diachronically derived from their source constructions, and what typological and socio-cultural factors motivate the emergence and proliferation of such suffixes. The chapter surveys how suffixes index the speaker or both the speaker and addressee as an integral component in their semantic structure. It then examines how such (inter)subjective inflectional suffixes have diachronically been grammaticalized from non-subjective source constructions. The chapter shows that in Korean and in other languages, subjectification tends to lead to intersubjectification and not vice versa. Finally, the chapter argues that the relatively extensive diversity of inflectional suffixes in Korean, especially intersubjective suffixes, is due to two facts: 1) typologically head-final syntax and a typical agglutinative morphology and 2) the time-honored cultural values of hierarchism and collectivism as well as recent dynamic socio-economic mobilities in Korean society and culture.

This chapter focuses on how emotions are expressed, enacted and communicated in language. Although words such as “anger,” “joy,” and “fear” sound like names for precisely defined psychological objects, their exact descriptive meaning is hard to pin down. Disagreements about which words count as emotion names are common both within and across societies, with language encoding emotional events in different ways depending on circumstances. Emotion words also serve a range of pragmatic and performative functions in conversations and arguments. They can convey blame or assign credit, and establish, maintain or break social connections as well as merely describe personal experience. No all-purpose representational system seems capable of explaining this diversity. Indeed, the main purpose of emotional language may be to facilitate various forms of social influence rather than merely to codify emotional distinctions relating to personal experience.