Abstract：The linguistic turn of western philosoply was paid great attention to in the second half of the twentieth century. As the main representative of daily linguistics, Austin started the exploration of the theory of speech acts. His performative utterance was the starting point of the establishment of the theory of speech acts. Based on that, Austin correlated dichotomy with trichotomy, endowing performative utterance with philosophical implication. Performative utterance was the foundation of Austin's“do things with words”, which reversed the traditional philosophy's view and reflection on language. In this paper, we explore the formation, classification and assessment of this theony, promoting the analytical methodsin language philosophy to solve traditional philosophical problems.

Keyword：Austin;speech acts;performative utterance;