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A speech act in linguistics and the philosophy of language is something expressed by an individual that express not only information, but perform an action as well. For example, let's say that someone were to say, "I would like the mashed potatoes, could you please pass them to me?" This utterance would be considered a speech act as it expresses the speakers desire to acquire the mashed potatoes, as well as presenting a request that one of their friends pass the potatoes to him. According to Kent Bach, "almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience". The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts are commonly taken to include such acts as apologising, promising, ordering, greeting, requesting, complaining, warning, inviting, refusing, and congratulating.

1. A locutionary act: the performance of an utterance: the actual utterance and its apparent meaning, comprising any and all of its verbal, social, and rhetorical meanings, all of which correspond to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance;
2. an illocutionary act: the active result of the implied request or meaning presented by the locutionary act. For example, if the locutionary act in an interaction is the question "Is there any salt?" the implied illocutionary request is "Can someone pass the salt to me?";
3. and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act: the actual effect of the locutionary and illocutionary acts, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something, whether intended or not