Performative is a sentence naming the action the utterance of this sentence is, e.g. I warn you that it s hot; I must request that you sit down immediately; I can assure you that he is not at home. It was Koschmieder who discovered such sentences in his investigation of present forms in Polish. He named the phenomenon coincidence (of word and action), and considered it as nothing but a particular meaning of the present. Austin, unlike Koschmieder, firstly gave the name of performatives to the utterances, which do something, rather than provide a piece of information, e.g. I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow; I give and bequeath my watch to my brother. Right from the start Austin paid few attention to what Koscmieder had stressed, namely to the fact of coincidence of word and action, in other words he paid few attention to the self-nomination, or self-reference of the sentence. First Austin s examples of performatives were utterances changing social or simply intensional relationship. The basic difference between Austin s and Koschmieder s approaches to the same phenomenon resulted in different terms: coincidence - performance. The role of self-nomination in austinian notion of performatives increased when Austin proceeded to build up his theory of speech acts. In this doctrine, as Austin formulated it, every utterance has its explicit performative synonymous which indicates the communicative force of this utterance most clearly. The number and structure of a language speech acts reflects in the number and lexical structure of the verbs that can be used in this language performatively. However, the grammatical form of explicit performative adopted by Austin and now well known as classical performative was arbitrary. It mattered much less than the lexical meaning of performative verb. Austin used this form as a test for performativeness. Performatives were not the object but the main instrument in Austin s theory, so Austin did not consider their grammatical features. The performative analysis borrowed the austinian notion of performative and put it in a quite different framework - that of the generative syntax. Inscribing the highest performative verb, its subject and object in the structure of every sentence neutralized the difference between simple and complex sentences, and enabled to unify and formalize various syntactic rules. But in this kind of analysis, although formal unlike Austin s speech act theory, performatives were an instrument, too. Their grammatical forms were not investigated. It can be supposed that the methodological importance of performatives in so powerful doctrines as that of speech acts and the generative grammar rather than their grammatical peculiarity rendered performatives so popular in linguistics. Vendler was the first who since Koschmieder considered performatives as an object of grammar. His syntactic description of performatives provided grammatical support for Austin s modified taxonomy of speech act verbs. The classical performative form, that of the 1st pers. sing. act. indic. (simple) present, has always been the focal point of the grammatical investigations in the performative area. It is usually taken for a grammatical criterion of performativeness. However paradoxical it seems, the overestimation of this form is the main obstacle in the way of the grammatical study of performatives. The problem is that the grammatical criterion as an analytic quality can hardly coexist with no less analytic and indisputable criterion of self-nomination. Putting these heterogeneous criteria in the description of performative leads us to the question of how a number of non-classical self-nominating forms are to be identified. Fraser showed in his Hedged perforrnatives that many verbs have so free grammatical conditions for their performative use that can be used performatively even under negation, e.g. I will not point out to you that your face is dirty; I m not going to add that we are