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For example, in the sentences below, 1 and 2 differ only in the verb and both are acceptable. In the corresponding pair, 3 and 4, the use of "hereby" before the non-performative verb see is not coherent because the action of seeing is not performed simply by its utterance. I confer this award; I see this award; I hereby confer this award
in order to command someone to leave the room then this utterance is part of the performance of a command; and the sentence, according to Austin, is neither true nor false; hence the sentence is a performative; – still, it is not an explicit performative, for it does not make explicit that the act the speaker is performing is a command.
Each function word either: gives grammatical information about other words in a sentence or clause, and cannot be isolated from other words; or gives information about the speaker's mental model as to what is being said. Grammatical words, as a class, can have distinct phonological properties from content words.
The active voice is the most commonly used in many languages and represents the "normal" case, in which the subject of the verb is the agent. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action or causes the happening denoted by the verb. Sentence (1) is in active voice, as indicated by the verb form saw.
Linguists use grammaticality judgements to investigate the syntactic structure of sentences. Generative linguists are largely of the opinion that for native speakers of natural languages , grammaticality is a matter of linguistic intuition , and reflects the innate linguistic competence of speakers.
In these typical, rather explicit cases of performative sentences, the action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing, promising) is performed by the utterance of the sentence itself. J.L. Austin claimed that performative sentences could be "happy or unhappy". They were only happy if the speaker does the actions he or she talks about.
The combination of SVO order and use of auxiliary verbs often creates clusters of two or more verbs at the center of the sentence, such as he had hoped to try to open it. In most sentences, English marks grammatical relations only through word order. The subject constituent precedes the verb and the object constituent follows it.
The sentence can be read as "Reginam occidere nolite, timere bonum est, si omnes consentiunt, ego non. Contradico. " ("don't kill the Queen, it is good to be afraid, even if all agree I do not. I object."), or the opposite meaning " Reginam occidere nolite timere, bonum est; si omnes consentiunt ego non contradico.