ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two assumptions that are crucial to the theory developed in this work. The first assumption is that the component of intentionality that is part of traditional speech act theories need not be represented directly in order to account for the phenomena of speech acts in discourse. It is argued that the range of possible speaker intentions. vis-a-vis a discourse situation, is strictly delimited by the rules governing moves in discourse and constraints on the end-states that utterances can effect, hence can be pragmatically and semantically determined. The second assumption is that part of the competence of individual speakers consists of having an inventory of speech act types, which encode not only the effects Of speech acts on discourse situations but also the preconditions that enable speech acts to occur. These speech act types consist, principally, of propositions giving relationships among speaker, addressee, and interpretations of utterance constituents, which together represent the meaning of an utterance in a particular situation; and of conditions on the discourse situation in which they are used.
