Would any linguists care to help me understand the difference between the three?
Locution: what someone says (the utterance itself). “He said, ‘ouch’.”
Illocution: the speech act of an utterance. “He complained with a loud ‘ouch’.”
Perlocution: A speech act that has a persuasive motivation. “He said, ‘ouch,’ indicating that he wanted the nurse to remove the needle.”
Ah, so they’re all different *aspects *of the same utterance, not different, mutually-exclusive, *types *of utterances?
I think that’s a good way of putting it.
Check out the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics.