ABSTRACT
In the period since Austin, Grice and Searle 1 made their primary contributions to speech act theory two strongly opposed views of that theory have been canvassed. One, following from work initially presented in Searle and Vanderveken’s Foundations of elocutionary Logic (1985) and developed in Vanderveken’s Meaning and Speech Acts (1990–1), has sought to construct a formal theory of such acts which could be accommodated within a system such as Montague Grammar. The other, due initially to Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance (1986), has argued that there is no room, or need, for a theory of speech acts. On the face of it these two views are strongly opposed, although, as I shall seek to show, that appearance is in part illusory.
