Halyna D. Malyk Speech Acts and Events

Direct and Indirect Illocutionary Acts

Searle pointed out that an implicit performative can be carried out indirectly by appearing to carry out another illocutionary speech act (When uttering a question Can you bring me your book? you are issuing a directive). It turns out that there is a a simple way of differentiating direct and indirect illocutionary acts

This structural distinction between the types of speech acts is provided by the three basic sentence types. As shown in the table below, there is an easily recognized relationship between the structural forms (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory) and the general communicative functions (statement, question, command/request). Whenever there is a direct relationship between a structure and a function, we have a direct speech act. Whenever there is an indirect relationship between a structure and a function, we have an indirect speech act.