Ijo Kwa illative (Lat. illatus ‘brought in’]

The fundamental aspect of a speech act in the speech act theory of J.L.Austin and J.R. Searle. According to Searle, a simple illocution consists of an illocutionary force and a propositional content and, thus, has the form f(p), where f and p may vary-within certain limits-independently from one another. If one takes f as the forces of an assertion and a question and p as the proposition that it is cold and that the car will not start, then there are four different illocutions: (a) the assertion that it is cold; (b) the assertion that the car will not start; (c) the question of whether it is cold; and (d) the question of whether the car will not start. Intonation, punctuation, interrogative pronouns, interrogative adverbs, modal auxiliary, and indicators of verb mood, word and clausal order, modal particles, special affixes, special constructions like the A-not-A interrogative in Mandarin, as well as the form of explicit performative utterances all function as illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs). The latter types are used in disambiguating an illocution as, for example, in legal contexts (I hereby make a final request that you pay your bill from the 29th of February of 1992). According to Searle, the meaning of the illocutionary force indicating devices is based on the rules for their use (cf. constitutive rules, regulative rules, speech act theory, meaning as use). In every language, one indicator (or a combination of several) serves as a base indicator. An indirect speech act occurs whenever an illocution other than that indicated literally by the base indicator is performed with the utterance of a sentence.