Performatives

This entry discusses a number of relevant issues linked to Slavic performative utterances and performative verbs against the background of speech-act theory (as laid out, among others, in Austin 1975), including the different syntactic realization of performative utterances in various Slavic languages, the distinction between performative and nonperformative verbs within the class of speech-act (illocutionary) verbs, and the set of mechanisms possibly underlying different patterns of tense-aspect licensing for Slavic explicit performatives. For space reasons, a diachronic overview on tense-aspect marking of Slavic performatives is not included in the present survey (cf. Biasio 2019 for Old East Slavic and Middle Russian; Dekker 2018: 129–148 for Old Novgorod dialect; Derganc 1996 for Old Slovene; Kamphuis 2012; 2020: 168–171 for Old Church Slavic; Pavlović 2000 for Old Štokavian; Dickey 2015 for a cross-Slavic diachronic study).