Portfolio entry #3

According to the linguistic J.L Austin, words not only bring about actions, sometimes words themselves are actions such as apologizing, ordering, warning, promising.  These words are called Speech acts because they cause an action. 
We find two separate parts of speech: a Constative sentence and a Performative one. Constatives are sentences that describe something as true or false. Performatives are sentences that denote an action, they inspire action. These kind of sentences depend on context and reception, these are known as Felicity conditions. If these conditions are not met then the Performative does not have the power to denote action. However, meeting these conditions does not mean that the action inspired by the Performative is followed. This depend on whether the people respect the power of words or not.