Performative utterance
J. L. Austin's name for words that carry out an act when said, such as a vow or a naming, a model often applied to spells.
Also: speech act, performative, words that do things
The philosopher J. L. Austin introduced performative utterances in lectures in 1955, published as How to Do Things with Words (1962). Saying I promise or I name this ship is not describing an act but doing it, provided the right person says it in the right setting. Anthropologists, notably Stanley Tambiah, applied the idea to ritual language, arguing that spells and blessings work, in the minds of those who use them, as acts of this kind: they are effective through form, authority and circumstance. The model lets scholars discuss how a spell is believed to function without having to say whether it does.