 Speech act theory in general is derived from the work of J.L. Austin, a British philosopher who flourished shortly after World War II. Austin distinguishes three things a person typically does in uttering a sentence, say, “The door is open”. He utters certain words—“the”, “door”, “is”, and “open”—with certain meanings; this is a locutionary act. He states that the door is open; this is an illocutionary act. And he convinces someone that the door is open; this is a perlocutionary act. As Austin says, it is in uttering a sentence with a certain meaning (that is, in performing a locutionary act) that we perform an illocutionary act. Illocutionary acts have come to be called speech acts. Asserting, requesting, arguing, ordering, promising, and so on are all examples of speech acts, but there are many, many different speech acts. Last, as Austin also says, it is by uttering a certain sentence with a certain meaning that we perform certain other acts, acts partly defined in terms of their effects on listeners: convincing, enraging, pleasing, deceiving, and so on. These are perlocutionary acts. I utter the words “The door is open”; in doing so, I state that the door is open; by so doing, I convince you that the door is open.