Our “performative”: speech acts merely in uttering them, we establish facts in the world

 Austin (1961, 1962) points out that language is not only reserved for describing states of affairs in the world. 

Certain utterances are “performative”: merely in uttering them, we establish facts in the world. A minister, for instance, marries a couple with an invocation. Searle (1995, 2010) argues that all “institutional facts” are generated in this way. Every constitutive rule, he argues, is a product of a declarative speech act,