In linguistics and the philosophy of language, a __locutionary act__ is the performance of an utterance, and is one of the types of force, in addition to illocutionary act and perlocutionary act, typically cited in Speech act Speech Act Theory is a subfield of pragmatics that explores how words and sentences are not only used to present information, but also to perform actions - wikipedia 
As an utterance, a locutionary act is considered a Performative utterance, in which both the audience and the speaker must trust certain conditions about the speech act. These conditions are called felicity conditions and are divided into three different categories: the essential condition, the sincerity condition, and the preparatory condition.
The term equally refers to the surface meaning of an utterance because, according to J. L. Austin's posthumous ''How To Do Things With Words'', a speech act should be analysed as a locutionary act (''i.e.'' the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic, and Theme–rheme acts corresponding to the speech, syntactic, and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance), as well as an illocutionary act (the semantic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its real, intended meaning), and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act (''i.e.'' its actual effect, whether intended or not).