In linguistics and philosophy, describing a statement that is about establishing facts or making claims about how things are, rather than performing an action.
From constate + -ive (adjective suffix). Developed in 20th-century philosophy of language to describe truth-apt statements, contrasted with performative utterances.
Constative vs. performative is a brilliant linguistic distinction—'It's raining' is constative (about facts), but 'I now pronounce you married' is performative (the words do the action), and this changed how philosophers understood language.
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