Simple and Complex Speech Acts: What Makes the Difference within a Developmental Perspective

In the linguistic psychological literature, there is a classical distinction between direct and indirect speech acts. In particular, some theories claim that the latter are more difficult to produce and comprehend than the former. We propose to abandon such a distinction in favour of a novel one between simple and complex speech acts. This distinction applies to any kind of pragmatic phenomena, from standard speech acts to non standard ones, like irony and deceit. Our proposal is based on the types of mental representations and mental operations involved in speech acts production and comprehension.