Was Austin's performative/constative distinction abandoned?
While I initially proposed a strong distinction between performative and constative utterances in 'Performatives, Explicit and Implicit,' I later came to see that this dichotomy was too rigid. In my later work, especially in 'How to Do Things with Words,' I acknowledged that even seemingly constative utterances can have performative aspects, and that all utterances involve illocutionary force. The initial distinction served as a useful starting point for exploring the active nature of language.
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