A locutionary act, or a locutionary speech act in JL Austin’s definition, is the part of an utterance which is the thing which is actually being said. In other words one can define as a locutionary act as the act of producing sounds that have meaning. Meaning is key here do explain Austin’s idea and to give examples, since a parakeet which calls “it is raining”, for example, does not perform a locutionary act since it does not understand the meaning of the utterance.
Good examples for sentences which are
locutionary acts are any utterances which simply contain a meaningful statement
about objects. For example: “the baby is crying” or “the sky is blue”. Other examples
of locutionary acts can help us understand them is linguistic terms of meaning
and reference. Such example sentences include: “there is a dog over there” or “Jack
loves Jill”. Once again, in order to give a good example of a locutionary act
you need to simply thing of a sentence that has meaning, and it is the meaning
part of that sentence which is locutionary.
Other aspects of an utterance are the speech
acts termed by Austin as illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, which will be covered with examples
in the following links:
Examples of illocutionary acts
Examples of perlocutionary acts
Summary of How to Do Things With Words by J.L.Austin
In depth:
