Saying 'I now pronounce you married' doesn't describe a fact — it creates one

Philosopher J.L. Austin noticed that some sentences don't describe the world at all; they perform an action just by being said, like 'I promise', 'I now pronounce you married', or 'I name this ship'. He called these performative utterances, and built a theory of 'speech acts' around the idea that language does things as much as it states things. His student John Searle later systematized the theory, and it became foundational to modern linguistics and philosophy of language.

— J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words — 1962 (delivered as lectures in 1955)
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