John Searle's Felicity Condition

First of all the way the philosophers Austin and Searle analysed the speech act in utterances different.

A sentence can be unsuccessful when we mispronounce it or produce an ungrammatical sentence. But even a perfectly well-formed sentence can go wrong in the sense that it is situationally inappropriate. In order to be successful, a speech act needs to be performed along certain types of conditions. These conditions were categorized by the linguist John Searle, who introduced the term appropriateness conditions respectively felicity condition. Felicity Conditions are subcategorised in general conditions, preparatory conditions, content conditions, sincerity conditions. Based on the lecture notes that retrieved from student intranet of university of Nicosia, Searle developed Austin’s idea that it is possible to state the necessary conditions for a particular illocution to ‘count’.

Austin made a distinction

Thus, for example the utterance ‘I name this ship Queen Elizabeth’ is not felicitous if uttered by a person not authorised to perform the christening of the ship, or even if the ship has already been named. Performative verbs  verbs such as ‘promise’, ‘request’, ‘apologise’, ‘baptise’, ‘name’ etc. in the first person singular present active, describing the kind of act that is being performed

J.L. Austin analysed the speech act theory in order to understand the aim of the place was the first theory to most powerfully propose that language is not just used to describe the world but, most of the times, it is used to accomplish goals (i.e. to request, to invite, to promise, to apologise, to refuse etc. - Language, previously analysed semantically, based on truth conditions, was now examined from a contrary point of view - language as