performative.

1. Having the effect of carrying out an action through an utterance rather than simply describing it.

2. Done mainly to create an impression rather than from sincere feeling or commitment.

3. Involving the presentation or enactment of an artistic or theatrical performance.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• performative utterance
• performative verb
• performative language

On the page

In an authorized ceremony, 'I pronounce you married' is a performative utterance.

Usage notes

Primary category: academic / formal / analytical. Lexical Type: Word. Forms: Relational senses normally non-gradable. Display sense: more performative; most performative. Commonness: moderately common (editorial estimate; not a corpus frequency statistic). Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1; numbered fields keep each relevant meaning separate. Research distinction: Cambridge explicitly supplies artistic-performance, insincere-display, and language-performing-action adjective uses; three are separated, with a potential noun-use allocation flagged. Writing functions: semantic analysis, language and rhetoric, conceptual distinction.