‘I pronounce you husband and wife.’ This is probably the most well-known example of what linguists call a performative. A performative is a statement that performs some action in the world. It does not just describe what is happening, as normal statements do, but it also does something. After that statement is made, the man and woman have become something different. Before, they were not married, and now they are.
Performatives have very specific grammatical properties. First, they are always in first person, since the speaker is the one who is both speaking and performing the performative. Second, it is restricted to a very specific class of verbs. Saying something like ‘I am hereby running’ does not make a whole lot of sense because the speaker is not running by virtue of saying he or she is running. So we need the right verb.
Third, at least in English, performatives are restricted to the simple present tense. Wedding officiants never say ‘I am pronouncing you husband and wife,’ which would be the present progressive. They always use the simple present, which is normally not used in the present to describe an event that is happening now. The first two grammatical properties are consistent for performatives across languages, but there is variation in what verb forms are used. Given the semantics of performatives this should come as no surprise.
