A socio-pragmatic comparative study of

2. 10. 2. J. R. Searle 
John Searle (1969) brought greater systematicity to the ideas which Austin had so 
perceptively explored. He focused on the idea that meaning is a kind of doing. He 
claimed that the study of language is just a sub-part of the theory of action. Searle 
crystallized the concepts of illocutionary act and illocutionary force to the extent where 
one can reasonably speak of his speech act theory as the classical account which 
functions as a point of departure for subsequent work on speech acts. The term "speech 
act theory" is in practice a reference to illocutionary acts.
The conditions which were required to be present if a given speech act was to be 
effectively performed, were used by Searle to offer definitions of various speech acts. 
Searle proposes four kinds of rules on the basis of these conditions: 
(1) Propositional Content Rules: specify the kind of meaning expressed by the 
propositional part of an utterance; 
(2) Preparatory Rules: delineate the conditions which are pre-requisite to the 
performance of the speech act; 
(3) Sincerity Rules: outline the conditions which must obtain if the speech act is to be 
performed sincerely;
(4) Essential Rules: specify what the speech act must conventionally count as.
On the basis of these four rule types, different speech acts can be easily distinguished. 
In other words, speech act theory lends itself to establishing systems of classification for 
illocutions. Searle (1979), as an improvement of the classification of the speech acts 
proposed by Austin, classifies speech acts into: 
a) Assertives: commit S(peaker) to the truth of some proposition; 
b) Directives: count as attempts to bring about some effect through the action of 
H(earer); 
c) Expressives: count as the expression of some psychological state; 
d) Commissives: commit S to some future action;
e) Declaratives: are speech acts whose "successful" performance brings about the 
correspondence between the propositional content and reality.
(cf. Leech and Thomas, 1985: 179)