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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.
This density is calculated as a ratio of the total number of clauses across sentences, divide by the number of sentences in a discourse sample. [30] For example, if the clause density is 2.0, the ratio would indicate that the sentence being analyzed has 2 clauses on average: one main clause and one subordinate clause.
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.
Performativity is the concept that language can function as a form of social action and have the effect of change. [1] The concept has multiple applications in diverse fields such as anthropology, social and cultural geography, economics, gender studies (social construction of gender), law, linguistics, performance studies, history, management studies and philosophy.
For example, many linguistic theories, particularly in generative grammar, give competence-based explanations for why English speakers would judge the sentence in (1) as odd. In these explanations, the sentence would be ungrammatical because the rules of English only generate sentences where demonstratives agree with the grammatical number of ...
By contrast, generative theories generally provide performance-based explanations for the oddness of center embedding sentences like one in (2). According to such explanations, the grammar of English could in principle generate such sentences, but doing so in practice is so taxing on working memory that the sentence ends up being unparsable ...
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
Chomsky (1965) made a distinguishing explanation of competence and performance on which, later on, the identification of mistakes and errors will be possible, Chomsky stated that ‘’We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations)’’ ( 1956, p. 4).