Shouting Your Pronouns in a Crowded Theater

Let’s try out a thought experiment. Imagine you’re in a crowded theater and someone yells, “Fire!” What happens? People flee the room in a panic. Rightly so. Now let me change the question slightly. When someone yells, “Fire!” what happens linguistically?

According to philosopher J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory in his influential book How to Do Things with Words, three things occur:  locution, Illocution, and perlocution. In locution, there is information transfer: a fire is present. In illocution, the yelling affected the yeller: perhaps he or she became a hero in his or her own mind. In perlocution, something happened to the listeners: they fled in terror. The exclamation of “Fire!” changed the scene dramatically.