We shall take, then, for our first examples some utterances which can fall into no hitherto recognized grammatical category save that of ‘statement’, which are not nonsense, and which contain none of those verbal danger-signals which philosophers have by now detected or think they have detected (curious words like ‘good’ or ‘all’, suspect auxiliaries like ‘ought’ or ‘can’, and dubious constructions like the hypothetical): all will have, as it happens, humdrum verbs in the first person singular present indicative active.
J.L. Austin
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Cambridge University Press.
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