ABSTRACT

In studying speech-act verbs, people will find useful the distinctions which J. L. Austin, Searle, and others have made in their classification of speech acts themselves. A fitting way to begin the study of speech-act verbs is with the well-known distinction Austin makes between three kinds of speech act: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act, and a perlocutionary act. In the area of speech-act verbs, as in most other areas of the lexicon, the language make fuzzy category distinctions, whereas the realities to which these categories apply are often scalar or indeterminate. Speech activity can vary along many different dimensions, and an appropriate model for representing it is that of a means-ends analysis allowing continuous values, multiple goals, and goals of varying indirectness. It is also the case that speech-act activity does not often lend itself to segmentation into discrete 'acts' in the way assumed by speech-act theory.