ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces two aspects of speech act theory that have cognitive implications for acquisition, namely the difference between direct and indirect speech acts and the notion of conventionalization. It demonstrates that the difference between direct and indirect speech acts is not validated by developmental data on the acquisition of requests. As Levinson pointed out, the notion of indirect speech act is dependent on the literal force hypothesis, in other words on the assumption that illocutionary force is built into sentence form. The literal force hypothesis and the idea that indirect speech acts convey both their literal and non-literal meanings have some clear implications for the way adult speakers should process direct and indirect speech acts. From a developmental perspective, the difference between direct and indirect speech acts leads to some predictions about their acquisition. In Searle's theory, conventionalization rests on the list of felicity conditions explaining the transition between direct and indirect speech acts.
