ABSTRACT
By setting up a classification of illocutionary forces that had little to do with the theory of speech acts that he was principally concerned with elucidating, Austin (1962) established a small but flourishing industry devoted to the taxonomization of the conventional acts that people do in saying things. Austin’s five picturesquely named classes – verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives and expositives – have been the subject of much criticism by subsequent taxonomists, the main complaint being that, to the extent that unambiguous criteria are used in characterizing the classes at all, these criteria are de latero muri, which is to say, they are unrelated to any of the apparatus that was independently used in the discussion of illocutionary acts in the rest of Austin’s work. In his alternative taxonomization, Searle (1975) improved upon Austin by at least providing a scheme that was not entirely unrelated to the dissection that he provides in Speech Acts (Searle 1969).
