At the beginning of How to Do Things with Words (1962), John Langshaw Austin challenged the common assumption that "the business of [a declarative sentence] can only be to 'describe' some state of affairs, or to 'state some fact'" (p. 1). Obviously, that is not the business of interrogative and imperative sentences, but Austin argued that even certain declarative sentences are typically used to do something other than make statements. For example, an employer can fire someone by saying "You're fired," and an employee can quit by saying "I quit." In uttering such a sentence, one is not merely saying what one is doing, one is actually doing it. Such a sentence has a remarkable property: To utter it is (typically) to perform an act of the very sort named by its main verb.

It does seem remarkable that you can do something just by saying what you...