J. L. Austin famously distinguished between 'constative' utterances that convey information and 'performative' utterances that perform actions. In this groundbreaking new book, Douglas Robinson argues that Austin's distinction can be used to understand linguistic methodologies.

Thoughts and Utterances is the first sustained investigation of two distinctions which are fundamental to all theories of utterance understanding: the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly communicated and what is implicitly communicated.