ABSTRACT
The topic of indirect speech acts raises a number of important methodological issues for Speech Act Theory (SAT). These focus on the key question of the nature of the link which there must be if SAT is, amongst other things, a theory of the relation between two very different levels of description. The first level is concerned with features of utterances, such as mood and modality, whereas the second with a distinctive class of acts, so-called illocutionary acts. The levels are, of course, quite distinct, yet if the theory is correct it must be possible to give a systematic description of how they are connected. However, as we shall see, it is very difficult to describe that connection.
