Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Relating to or being an utterance that asserts or states something that can be judged as true or false, such as The cat is on the mat.
- n. A constative utterance, such as an assertion.
Wiktionary
- adj. linguistics Pertaining to an utterance relaying information and likely to be regarded as true or false.
Etymologies
- New Latin cōnstatīvus (translation of German konstatierend, present participle of konstatieren, to indicate as factual), from Latin cōnstāre, to stand firm, be fixed (influenced by third person sg. present tense cōnstat, it is manifest, it is a fact, and statīvus, stationary); see constant. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“This seems like a simple statement, what the linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin termed a constative utterance: a base level of communication, with no metaphor or secondary meanings attached.”
“Assertion, by contrast, is the paradigm of a constative utterance.”
“Austin had earlier (1956) initiated the development of speech act taxonomy by means of the distinction between constative and performative utterances.”
“However, when developing his general theory of speech acts, Austin abandoned the constative/performative distinction, the reason being that it is not so clear in what sense something is done e.g. by means of an optative utterance, expressing a wish, whereas nothing is done by means of an assertoric one.”
“Yet precisely because it is neither simply prescriptive nor descriptive, neither purely constative nor performative, heil risks rendering the”
“As inhabitants of modernity we might, however, first and foremost associate the “lost one” of patriotic melancholy with the nation state, that which paradoxically can never be lost, if patriotism has any constative or performative value to it.”
“At stake in this description is the very interruption of cognitive and performative language that de Man explains will emerge in the book itself — i.e., the interruption of the difference between a book about romanticism (cognitive, constative) and a book of romanticism and its disruption”
“All texts are events, even when largely constative.”
History against Historicism, Formal Matters, and the Event of the Text: De Man with Benjamin
“In linguistic terms, these two poles are aligned with the constative and the performative, the latter being not quite identical with the expressive, since that category assumes a certain interiority which is not requisite for the performative.”
“(Austin presents the distinction between performative and constative utterances.)”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘constative’.
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phrontistery - c
from phrontistery.info
caballine, cabas, cable, caboched, cabochon, caboose, cabotage, cabré, cabrie, cabriole, cabriolet, cacaesthesia and 1298 more...
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Beyond Questions
Does pork cavort?, Do bungalows have..., Do burro(w)s have..., What do zappa zap?, indubitability, indisputability, in spades, myrmidon, West Lothian ques..., Lagrange multipliers, ultramontanism, conundrum and 18 more...
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zachg's Words
verisimilitude, phenomenology, polyvalent, aleatoric, ontology, epistemology, solipsism, monad, hermeneutic, heuristic, performative, constative and 142 more...
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Metaflip
Blasted binaries, background pattern inversions, and subtlety awareness.
apophenia, fissiparous, doppelganger, intertextuality, presque vu, unsung, dittology, enantiodromia, pareidolia, silhouette, rorschach, galanty and 151 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for constative.
whichbe Capable of being true or false. (from Phrontistery) May 25, 2008