ABSTRACT
In a typical speech situation involving a speaker, a hearer, and an utterance by the speaker, there are many kinds of acts associated with the speaker's utterance. The speaker will characteristically have moved his jaw and tongue and made noises. In recent years there has been in the philosophy of language considerable discussion involving the notion of rules for the use of expressions. Some philosophers have even said that knowing the meaning of a word is simply a matter of knowing the rules for its use or employment. Utterances of each of these on a given occasion would characteristically be performances of different illocutionary acts. Regulative rules characteristically take the form of paraphrased as imperatives. The preparatory condition is that the speaker must have just encountered the hearer, and the essential rule is that the utterance indicates courteous recognition of the hearer. To construe them under the category of linguistic communication necessarily involves construing their production as speech acts.
