Blurb:

Chapter 3, Understanding speech acts, briefly summarises some approaches to speech act theory, including the approaches of Austin (1962), Searle (1969), Searle & Vanderveken (1985). It is argued that meaning and language are related through use, and it is through the performance of illocutionary acts that speakers, using language, communicate their thoughts in discourse. Searle (1979) proposed a taxonomy of speech acts. Along with this taxonomy, Searle also proposed a typology of possible illocutionary points of performative verbs and a classification of illocutionary forces of utterances. We draw upon these insights in this study.