5.

Speech act classifications

Mikhail Kissine

1. Introduction

At some point or another, virtually any attempt to theorise about speech or illocu-
tionary acts1 must rely – implicitly or explicitly – on taxonomic principles that
draw boundaries between them. As noted by Croft (1994), such a taxonomy often,
if not always, obeys the orientation of the theory itself. Questions are an obvious
example. More philosophically oriented scholars view speech acts primarily in
terms of the kind of actions they constitute. From this point of view, questions are
requests for information, and thus constitute, like requests, orders, commands, etc.,
a sub-class of “directive” speech acts. But scholars eager to trace boundaries along
grammatical lines would rather rely on the fact that imperative and interrogative
morpho-syntactic forms do not seem to overlap in any human language to, and
classify directives and questions apart.
On the face of it, one may be sceptical about the possibility to arriving at an em-
pirically viable, and theoretically useful taxonomy (e.g. Jaszczolt 2002: 304–309).
I agree that probably speech acts classes are not natural kinds. Yet, speech act clas-
sifications deserve attention for two related reasons. First, classificatory principles
may reveal theoretical commitments left implicit; second, drawbacks in one’s clas-
sification may point to a more fundamental analytical flaw.
The history of the study of speech acts is rife with competing classifications
(e.g. Vendler 1972; Fraser 1974; Searle 1979b; Sadock 1974, 1994; McCawley
1977; Hancher 1979; Bach and Harnish 1979; Ballmer and Brennenstuhl 1981;
Sbisà 1984; Croft 1994; Alston 2000; Zaefferer 2001), so that an exhaustive review
is impossible – and perhaps pointless – within the limits of this chapter. Neither
will I put forward a new classification of my own. Instead, this paper focuses on
three classificatory principles that I take to have the most important theoretical im-
plications for the study of speech acts qua actions: (a) speech acts as being conven-
tional, in a sense that goes beyond “linguistic” conventions); (b) speech acts as
expressions of mental states; (c) speech acts as linguistic actions. Rather than com-
paring different authors’ classifications, I will attempt to identify, for each prin-
ciple, potential methodological and empirical problems. However, Table 1 should
allow the reader to keep track of the three most well-known taxonomies as the dis-
cussion unfolds: Alston’s, Bach and Harnish’s, and Searle and Vanderveken’s
(which elaborates on Searle’s 1975b taxonomy). The provisional classification
Austin proposed in How to Do Things with Words (see Sbisà, this volume, Subsec-
tion 2.2.4) is largely abandoned today, on the one hand, because it recovers items

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Major Speech act classifications

Table 1:

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 Speech act classifications 175

that are not aptly qualified as illocutionary acts (such as “sympathise” or “intend”,
cf. Searle 1975b: 352), and, on the other hand, because some of his categories
prove far too heterogeneous (see, for instance, Searle 1975b: 353; Alston 2000:
85–89). However, the first rank of Table 1 should provide an idea of the filiation of
contemporary classifications with respect to his.

2. Criteria related to convention

2.1. Strawson’s dichotomy

Austin (1975), as is well known, held that illocutionary acts are distinctively con-
ventional. It is the conventional character of their effects that puts them apart from
other types of speech actions (most notably, from perlocutionary acts).2 Equally
famous is Strawson’s ([1964]1969) plea for a distinction between conventional
(or institutional) and non-conventional (or non-institutional) speech acts. In a nut-
shell, his criticism of Austin runs as follows. Understanding that an utterance
amounts to a conventional speech act, like, say, bidding five no trumps or opening a
meeting, requires knowing that certain conventions, peculiar to a certain group, are
in force. By contrast, in order to recognise a non-conventional illocutionary act, it
is sufficient, according to Strawson, to grasp a multi-layered Gricean communi-
cative intention, that is, approximately, an intention to achieve an illocutionary ef-
fect on the audience through the audience’s recognition of the intention to achieve
it (for details, see Kemmerling, this volume; Sbisà, this volume, Section 4.2).
In this section, I will concentrate on “conventional” speech acts; I will return to
the role played by Gricean intentions in the next one. It appears, from Strawson’s
paper, that conventional illocutionary acts are characterised by two main features.
First, in order to be performed with success, conventional illocutionary acts require
a system of “rule- or convention-governed practices and procedures of which they
essentially form parts” (1969: 397). For instance, the utterance of I baptise you
John, does not count as baptising when uttered by someone other than the priest
and/or on some other occasion than the ritual of baptism; but this utterance – the
speech act of baptising – has a fixed and essential part to play within the frame of
that ritual. Conventional speech acts correspond to complex actions that are gov-
erned by extra-linguistic conventions which happen to require the performance of
a certain linguistic utterance (cf. Urmson 1977).
Second, Strawson’s view implies that, by contrast to non-conventional illocu-
tionary acts, the successful performance of a conventional illocutionary act entails
its satisfaction. I will return to the notion of speech act satisfaction in a moment;
for now, it is sufficient to note that, in the relevant sense, satisfaction of all speech
acts (apart “expressive” ones, cf. below) entails the truth of the speech act’s prop-
ositional content. An order, even when understood as such, is not necessarily

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176 Mikhail Kissine

obeyed; advice, not necessarily followed; a promise, not always kept. These are all
non-conventional speech acts. By contrast, if the priest’s utterance is understood as
his baptising the child “John”, the child is baptised John. In this sense, conven-
tional speech acts can be said to be “self-verifying”.

2.2. Extra-linguistic conventions

Bach and Harnish (1979) rely on extra-linguistic conventions for defining conven-
tional illocutionary acts. While in their understanding a non-conventional illocution-
ary act requires the recognition of a complex communicative intention (cf. Sec-
tion 3.4), an utterance is interpreted as a certain conventional speech act X if, and
only if, it is mutually believed by the speaker S and the addressee A that this utter-
ance counts as X in a certain conventional context, and so because it is mutually be-
lieved that, in this kind of context, any utterance of this kind counts as X. In simpler
terms, conventional illocutionary acts succeed if, and only if, they count as such; and
they count as such, if, and only if, the words are uttered in what is mutually believed
to be the right place, by a speaker who is mutually believed to be the right person.
The same kind of strategy is adopted by Alston (2000). In his view, what he
calls, after Austin, exercitives are defined by non-linguistic rules, conventions or
institutions. In performing an exercitive, says Alston, S intends to produce some
conventional effect, and presents her utterance as conforming to the conditions –
determined by extra-linguistic conventions – that are necessary for her intention to
succeed.3
It is interesting to note that even among scholars who accept the conventional/
non-conventional divide, there is no uniform agreement as to what counts as a con-
ventional illocutionary act. Commissive speech acts are a good case in point. The
class of commissives comprises speech acts by which S binds herself to perform a
certain action. Typical examples are promises, offers and threats. Taking promises as
the prototypical example of commissive speech acts, one can argue that putting one-
self under an obligation is a matter of certain extra-linguistic, group-specific con-
ventions (this is the point of view defended by Sperber and Wilson 1995 and Alston
2000). As such, promises should fall on the conventional side of Strawson’s divide.
Bach and Harnish do not class commissives among conventional illocutionary
acts. They argue that, outside a specific institution, “to undertake an obligation is
not automatically to create one, even if S uses a performative like ‘I promise’. S’s
utterance may express her belief that an obligation is thereby created, but that does
not make the belief true even if A shares the belief and it is mutual” (1979: 125).
However, elsewhere, these authors characterise institutional reality in the follow-
ing terms: “We might define [institutional facts] quasi-inductively: an institutional
fact is (1) anything that is the case in virtue of being mutually believed in some col-
lectivity or (2) anything that follows from one or more institutional facts” (1979:
114). To my mind, if you and I mutually believe that, by my promise to come to

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 Speech act classifications 177

your party, I have undertaken the obligation to come, I have an obligation to come;
and if so, a successful promise creates an institutional fact by Bach and Harnish’s
own lights.
There is another way to argue that promises are not conventional speech acts.
The fact that, by default, any utterance of “I will VP”, where the VP describes an
intentional action , puts S under the obligation to perform  is explainable in con-
vention-independent terms. From S’s prediction that she will perform an inten-
tional action, A can infer, ceteris paribus, that S, at the time of utterance, intends to
perform . This, in turn, allows A to infer that S is certain that her intention will be
satisfied (cf. Anscombe 1957: 91–93; Davidson 2001: 83–102; Grice 2001: 9–10,
51–57, 101–105; for an empirical confirmation, see Malle and Knobe 2001).4 So, if
A has no reason to think that S is insincere or wrong, he will believe that the pre-
dicted action of S’s will take place. Now, belief revision has a cost, and further
interaction with an agent who represents a source of false beliefs should be
avoided. Since it is not in S’s interest to be rejected from further interaction, she
will attempt to avoid that A should revise her belief. Hence, S has a reason for
keeping her promise which is independent from the beliefs and desires she had at
the time of utterance (see Kissine 2008a, 2013: chapter 6).
Note that, in this analysis, any successful promise that p, realised without the
performative prefix I promise that/to, is eo ipso an assertion (a prediction) about p.
Does this mean that any promise of the form I will– is indirect, in the same way as a
question like Can you open the door? is an indirect request?5 Such an outcome is
highly counter-intuitive. However, the fact that an utterance corresponds to the
performance of two speech acts does not necessarily imply that one of them is in-
direct. Arguably, a speech act is indirect only if its content is distinct from that of
the corresponding direct speech act (see, for instance, Recanati 1987: 166–171).

2.3. Conventionality across the board

2.3.1. Searle
According to Searle (1969, 1992), Y is a conventional fact if, and only if, Y occurs
as the right member of the formula In context C, X counts as Y. Now, any illocu-
tionary act is an utterance that is interpreted in a certain way in a certain context.
Under such a conception, is it not the case that any illocutionary act is conven-
tional? In Searle’s view, it is, all the more because for him the illocutionary force is
built into sentence meaning by linguistic conventions. That is, for Searle, any well-
formed sentence type corresponds to a speech-act type in virtue of linguistic con-
ventions (for a detailed discussion, see Recanati 1987: 219–224, 2001, 2003). Any
illocutionary act X, performed by uttering the sentence s of a language L, is con-
ventional because it conforms to the following formula: In the context of linguistic
conventions constitutive of L, s counts as X.6

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178 Mikhail Kissine

Under such a view, there is no real difference between extra-linguistic and lin-
guistic conventions. Unsurprisingly, in order to distinguish between “institutional”
and “non-institutional” speech acts, Searle resorts to the second, “self-verifying”
characteristic of conventional speech acts (see Section 2.1). To repeat, the idea is
that the successful performance of a genuinely conventional speech act entails its
satisfaction: if a baptism is successful, the child is baptised. Searle (1975b, 1989;
also Searle and Vanderveken 1985a) defines a class of declarative speech acts in
precisely these terms: “A declaration is a speech act whose point is to create a new
fact corresponding to the propositional content” (1989: 549).7
Declarations are distinguished from other speech acts by the double “direction
of fit” of their conditions of satisfaction. An assertion has a word-to-world direc-
tion of fit; it is satisfied if, and only if, its propositional content “fits” the world.
When I assert that it is raining, my assertion is satisfied, according to Searle, if, and
only if, it is actually raining. An order or a promise has a world-to-word direction
of fit; it is satisfied if, and only if, the world changes in such a way as to fit the prop-
ositional content. When I order you to leave the room, my order is satisfied only if
you leave the room.8 By contrast, whenever it is satisfied, a declaration describes a
“fact” in the world, and this fact is brought into existence by the very performance
of the declaration.
However, the boundaries drawn by such a criterion are not as clear-cut as they
seem at the first glance. Take performative sentences. Prototypically, a per-
formative sentence has the form I VP– where the VP names the speech act S per-
forms by her utterance of this very sentence. A well-known property of utterances
of such sentences (henceforth, performative utterances; see Doerge, this volume)
is precisely that they are self-verifying. For instance, if I say “I promise to come”,
I hereby promise to come; if I say “I order you to leave”, I order you to leave, etc.
Performative utterances should thus be grouped with declaratives, viz. with insti-
tution-dependent speech acts. Searle (1989) and Searle and Vanderveken (1985a)
fully endorse this consequence. Exactly like institutional declaratives, per-
formatives bring to existence a new fact, argues Searle. They too have a double
direction of fit, since they describe a fact created by this very description. The only
difference is that while the former create extra-linguistic facts, performative utter-
ances generate linguistic facts – a certain speech act has been performed (also Re-
canati 1987: 142).
The debate about the semantics and pragmatics of performatives is one of the
longest lasting and most difficult in the history of speech act theory; obviously,
I cannot attempt to provide a proper discussion of it here (for some thoughts on the
matter, see Kissine, 2012). Let me just mention what I deem to be two undesirable
consequences of grouping performatives and institution-dependent speech acts to-
gether. First, as argued by Bach and Harnish, the successful performance of speech
acts like orders falls intuitively on the non-conventional side – whether or not they
correspond to a performative utterance. Yet, on Searle’s view (also Recanati 1987)

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 Speech act classifications 179

“I order you to leave” and “I declare you married” are both declarations (i.e. con-
ventional speech acts), whereas “Leave” is a directive speech act (and not a dec-
laration); which is quite a counter-intuitive result.9 Second, by making any self-
verifying utterance a declarative, Searle runs the risk to inflate this class beyond
plausibility. Utterances of “I am speaking now” or “I am speaking English” are
always true (although of course not logically true, cf. Kaplan 1989). And it is their
very utterance that makes them true, because they show – are natural signs of, in
Grice’s ([1957]1989) sense – what they mean (Johansson, 2003). But are they to be
considered on the same footing as institutional declarations?10

2.3.2 Millikan
It is important to note that Searle’s is not the only way to define speech acts as
being intrinsically conventional. According to Millikan (2005), conventional be-
haviours conform to the following two conditions:
a. Conventional behaviours are reproduced from anterior and similar – in the rel-
evant aspects – patterns of action. For instance, conventional behaviour con-
sisting in sending greeting cards at Christmas is reproduced from anterior
occurrences; however, not every aspect is reproduced – the appearance of the
postcards sent today differs from that of the postcards our grandparents used to
receive.
b. The main reason why conventional behaviours are performed is the weight of
the precedent from which they are reproduced. We send Christmas greetings
because our friends and relatives expect us to do so; and they expect us to do so
because on anterior Christmases they received Christmas greetings, and sent
greetings themselves. Without the weight of the precedent a conventional be-
haviour has little chance to emerge.
In order to see how this conception of conventionality applies to speech acts, it is
necessary to couple it with Millikan’s definition of a function. In a nutshell, accord-
ing to Millikan (1984: chapters 1 and 2, 2002), an entity X can be said to have the
function F if, and only if, the capacity to perform F is what explains X’s evolution-
ary history. More precisely, X has the function F, if, and only if, X was reproduced
from Y, Y has the properties resulting in F, and Y was selected because of these
properties. Under this conception, the function of the flu virus is to cause sneezing;
through sneezes, the virus is transmitted, and proliferates. Ceteris paribus, natural
selection would favour this type of flu virus over a mutant variety that does not
cause sneezing.
Millikan’s favourite example when applying this biological conception to lan-
guage is that of indicative and imperative sentences. The function of the former,
she says, is to cause beliefs, while the function of the latter is to prompt action. This
does not mean that every time an indicative or an imperative sentence is uttered,

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180 Mikhail Kissine

the corresponding effect is achieved. The idea is rather that the reason why such
sentence types continue to be used is because in a sufficient number of cases lan-
guage users expect indicative sentences to cause the belief that the content is true,
and imperative sentences to cause A to bring about the truth of the propositional
content.11
This makes utterances of indicative and imperative sentences instances of con-
ventional behaviour – in Millikan’s acceptation of conventional, that is. They
exemplify behaviour reproduced, in the relevant aspects (morpho-syntactic form),
from past occurrences; and this behaviour is reproduced because past occurrences
have yielded, in a sufficiently significant proportion, the expected effect (viz. caus-
ing beliefs or actions). So the speech acts Strawson classified as non-conventional
are conventional in Millikan’s theory.
The function of an expression-token does not necessarily coincide with S’s pur-
pose in using it. Recall that the function of an expression is determined by its evol-
utionary history – this function is the reason why it keeps being reproduced. But
nothing implies that this expression cannot be used with a different purpose. The
function of a hammer is to knock nails in – this is, basically, why we continue to
manufacture hammers –, but you can also use a hammer to break a window or
smack someone’s nose. So, suggests Millikan (2005: esp. chapter 8), what groups
Strawson’s non-conventional illocutionary acts together is either the function of
the sentence used or S’s purposes in using the sentence. The former criterion
applies, for instance, to indicative and imperative sentences. The latter is used to
classify finer-grained cases; for instance, all sentences that constitute warnings are
grouped together because they are produced with the same purpose – that of pre-
venting an action of A’s that can be harmful to him. Strawson’s conventional acts
(viz. institutional ones), by contrast, are grouped together, in Millikan’s theory, be-
cause they all have outcomes in virtue of being part of complex conventional
moves, encompassing all sorts of extra-linguistic conventions and/or regulations.
Millikan believes that her account shows that Strawson’s distinction between
non-conventional and conventional speech acts is somewhat fuzzy (cf. Millikan
2005: 164). Speech acts of both kinds are conventional – being behaviours repro-
duced because of their functions. It is true that the latter have practical outcomes in
virtue of being conventional; the act of declaring some people husband and wife
has an obvious practical outcome just because it is conventional. However, says
Millikan, in a way a speech act like a request (non-conventional in Strawson’s
sense) has a practical outcome too: A’s has been requested to do something.
For a similar reason, Recanati (1987) includes institutional speech acts in his
class of “performatives”, along with requests and promises. All of them purport to
change the world, and in this respect they contrast with “constative” speech acts,
like assertions or conjectures, which aim at representing the world. According to
Recanati, the only difference between requests and promises, on the one hand, and
institutional speech acts, on the other, is that the latter aim at a change that is sim-

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 Speech act classifications 181

ultaneous with the utterance, while the change potentially provoked by the latter is
delayed. Brandom (1994) would probably object that constatives change the world
too, for they impose on S the obligation to justify her assertion, exactly in the same
way promises impose on S the obligation to perform a certain action. (To this one
could add Hamblin’s (1987) “non-wilful” imperatives, such as advice, suggestions
and instructions, that lay S open to demands of justification.)12
Thus, all speech acts are conventional for Millikan. However, one should clas-
sify them into different categories by relying on three criteria. First, we have speech
acts that share the same biological functions; second, those characterised by the
same purpose; third, those that are part of wider, extra-linguistic conventions.
These categories, it should be noted, are not mutually exclusive. Virtually all
speech acts belonging to the last category share the same function, that of indicative
sentences. It thus appears that Strawson’s conventional speech acts constitute a
sub-set of a larger class, formed by indicative sentences. This sub-set is marked off
by extra-linguistic conventions, and/or by the fact that they are self-verifying. To
avoid terminological confusion, I will hereafter call all such speech acts institu-
tional. Whether major sentence types can be used for classificatory purposes –
whether they all have the same function – is a matter I will return to at the end of the
chapter. Finally, I for one am pessimistic about the prospect of establishing classes
of speech acts relative to S’s purposes. Such a strategy presupposes a principled
classification of speaker’s intentions, and this is not something easy to come by.

3. Criteria related to the expression of mental states

3.1. Direction of fit versus/plus expression

Searle (1975b) and Searle and Vanderveken (1985a) use the notion of direction of
fit to delineate four categories of speech acts. First, assertive speech acts that have
the “word-to-world” direction of fit: roughly, these speech acts aim at representing
the world. Second, those that have the “world-to-word” direction of fit: this group
encompasses both directives and commissives. Third, declaratives have a double
direction of fit. As for the remaining cases, they are all grouped under the label ex-
pressives. Expressive speech acts do not aim at representing the world nor at chang-
ing it. Take a “social” expressive, like greeting or congratulating. In congratulating
you for your new book I do not aim at representing the fact that your book is pub-
lished; rather, this fact is presupposed (e.g. Franken and Dominicy 2001). Since ex-
pressive illocutionary acts do not aim at fitting the world, nor at changing it in such
a way as to achieve fit, Searle (1975b) assigns them an empty direction of fit.
Importantly, both directive speech acts (e.g., orders, requests, and commands)
and commissive speech acts (e.g., promises, threats, and offers) have a world-to-
word direction of fit; both directives and commissives aim at changing the world in

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182 Mikhail Kissine

a way that makes the propositional content true. As we have seen, some scholars
are inclined to include commissive speech acts within the class of institutional
speech acts. However, in the previous Section we have seen that institutional
speech acts are characterised by a double direction of fit and/or by their depend-
ence on extra-linguistic conventions. Commissives clearly do not have a double di-
rection of fit, and, as I briefly discussed above, their dependence on group-specific
extra-linguistic conventions is far from being clear. But this does not make a tax-
onomy that groups speech acts like orders and promises together attractive.
A potential argument for grouping commissives and directives together is the
existence of first-person plural directives, like “Let’s write a paper”. The idea
would be that in such cases by her utterance S commits herself to bring about the
truth of the propositional content exactly in the same way as when she promises
“I will write a paper”. Yet, there are clear differences between first-person plural
directives and commissives (cf. Hamblin 1987: 36–39). A successful promise cre-
ates an obligation to keep it from the very moment of its utterance; directives, by
contrast, create an obligation to comply only if the addressee accepts it. With first-
person plural directives, the addressee is a group that includes S; but the potential
obligation to bring about the truth of the propositional content is conditional on the
acceptance by the whole group. Moreover, self-directed commands are linguisti-
cally distinct from commissives. In English, I can exhort myself to finish the paper
by saying either “Let me finish this paper now” or “Finish this paper now”; but
none of these forms would be adequate to promise you to finish the paper.13
In order to distinguish between directives and commissives, Searle (1975b)
includes sincerity conditions within his classificatory criteria. According to Searle
(1969), sincerity conditions of an illocutionary act X specify which mental state S
commits herself to having by her performance of X. The idea is intuitive enough.
By asserting that p, S commits herself to believing that p; by ordering A to do p, S
commits herself to desiring that A do p; by promising to do p, S commits herself to
having the intention to do p. Hence, the sincerity conditions of a directive speech
act are that for this act to be sincere, S must have the desire that the propositional
content be true, whereas sincerity conditions of a commissive speech act are that
for this commissive speech act to be sincere, S must have the intention to bring
about the truth of the propositional content. While both directives and commissive
have a world-to-word direction of fit, their sincerity conditions thus pull them apart.

3.2. Sincerity conditions and expression

According to Searle and Vanderveken, sincerity conditions of illocutionary acts are
revealed by Moorean paradoxes (Searle 1975b; Vanderveken 1990: 118). I cannot
assert that p, and simultaneously deny that I believe that p; I cannot order you to p,
and simultaneously deny that I want you to p; I cannot promise to p, and simulta-
neously deny that I intend to p. (But see below, Section 3.3) Now, as such, this does

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 Speech act classifications 183

not imply that in asserting that p, S expresses her belief that p, or that in ordering A
to bring about the truth of p, S expresses her desire that p be the case, or that in
promising to p, S expresses her intention to p. However, Searle (1969, 1983; see
also Searle and Vanderveken 1985a; Alston 2000) (implicitly) assumes that this is
so.
First, it is not an easy task to show that institutional speech acts have sincerity
conditions, or that they are expressions of mental states (cf. Green 2009). For many
such speech acts, “words suffice”. The judge may declare Smith guilty while
openly believing him innocent; he can even manifest the desire to set Smith free.
But independently from his beliefs or desires, the judge’s declaration has for effect
to change Smith’s juridical status. It thus seems – and Searle (1975b) agrees – that
institutional speech acts, his declaratives, have no sincerity conditions.14
It may be argued that in performing a declaration S commits herself to the be-
lief that she’s changing the world so as to make the propositional content true.
Green (2009) objects that an utterance like (1) has nothing bizarre.
(1) I hereby appoint you, although I doubt that I can do so.
Imagine, furthermore, that S’s doubts are groundless, and S happens to have the
requisite authority: (1) can result in a successful appointment. Do Searle and Van-
derveken (1985a: 57) err when they associate to declaratives15 sincerity conditions
containing the belief that the utterance changes the world as to make the proposi-
tional content true, and the desire to make this content true? Pace Green, the
example in (1) can be seen as a conditional declaration: its success depends on S
having the required authority. Accordingly, S’s belief that her utterance creates the
appointment is also conditional on her having the required authority.16 In any
event, even if the claim that institutional speech acts do not constitute mental state
expressions (or do not have sincerity conditions) is vindicated, it would have little
importance for speech act classification. As we have seen in the previous Section,
dependence on extra-linguistic conventions suffices to put these speech acts apart.
Next, let us consider expressive speech acts. In Searle’s (1975b, Searle and
Vanderveken 1985a) taxonomy, the point of expressive speech acts is simply to ex-
press the mental state specified in their sincerity conditions. But do all expressive
speech acts have sincerity conditions? This may not seem so obvious for “social”
expressives like apologies or congratulations. Such expressives often have a
merely social function; after all, we do not really care whether the person who is
apologising really feels contrition (cf. Bach and Harnish 1979: 51–55; Franken and
Dominicy 2001). Yet, as pointed out by Alston (2000: 112–113):
We get the familiar pragmatic contradiction from “I don’t feel any appreciation for the
gift, but thanks a lot”, or “I apologise. Of course, I feel absolutely no contrition for what
I did”. […] I can’t overtly admit that I don’t have the attitude in question while perform-
ing the socially required act. But if the social ritual had been effectively disengaged
from the spontaneous expressing, this would be possible.

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184 Mikhail Kissine

In the light of this, let us assume that the class of expressive speech acts en-
compasses the speech acts that express any mental state whatsoever (and that have
an empty direction of fit).

3.3. Multiple expressions of mental states

Recall that in Searle and Vanderveken’s (1985a) view, any successful illocutionary
act constitutes eo ipso the expression of the mental state specified in its sincerity
conditions. Since expressive speech acts are simply expressions of mental states, it
follows that assertive, directive and commissive speech acts entail the performance
of expressive speech acts: expressions of beliefs, desires and intentions, respect-
ively. (For declaratives, as we have just seen, this entailment probably does not
hold). This is what Searle and Vanderveken (1985a: 32–35) call the Principle of
Illocutionary Entailment.17
The question is how do we know exactly which are the sincerity conditions of a
given speech act? In other words, how do we know which mental state this speech
act expresses? As mentioned earlier, Searle’s rationale is based on Moorean unac-
ceptability. The underlying idea is the following: If it is impossible to successfully
perform the speech act X while conjoining to it the denial that one entertains the
mental state , then X constitutes the expression of .
This conception of expression is not without problems. In order for me to order
you successfully to leave the room, I must presuppose that it is possible for you to
leave the room. Utterances like (2) and (3) have a clear Moorean flavour.
(2) # Leave the room, and I know/believe that it is impossible for you to leave the
room.
(3) # I order you to leave the room, and I know/believe that it is impossible for you
to leave the room.
So, should we say that directive speech acts are expressions of beliefs too?
At this point, one might invoke the distinction between sincerity conditions
and preparatory conditions. In Searle’s (1969) view, an insincere speech act
is still successfully performed, although it is defective. By contrast, your capac-
ity to leave the room is a preparatory condition for my order to be successful. If
it is impossible for you to leave the room – say because you are tied to a chair –
then my utterance of “Leave the room” will not be interpreted as a literal direc-
tive speech act (but, say, as Al Capone’s style of black humour). Therefore,
the objection goes, the contents of preparatory conditions are not expressed. Yet,
the distinction between sincerity conditions and preparatory conditions is far
from being clear. If, unbeknownst to S, it is impossible for A to leave the room,
I see no reason to think of S’s order “Leave the room” as unsuccessful. S still will
have ordered A to leave the room – at least, this is how A will interpret S’s ut-
terance.

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 Speech act classifications 185

Furthermore, imagine that I am about to get on the ladder to fix a new lamp
bulb, and I ask you:
(4) Hold this ladder while I fix the lamp bulb.
Clearly, (4) is a directive speech act. But at least Searle’s conception of expression,
based on Moorean unacceptability, predicts that it is also an expression of my in-
tention to fix the lamp bulb, for (5) is pragmatically unacceptable.18
(5) # Hold this ladder while I fix the lamp bulb, and I have no intention whatsoever
to fix the lamp bulb.
A natural reaction at this point is to object that if there is an intention expressed in
(4), its content is not identical with the content of the speech act performed.
Searle’s idea is that a mental state expressed by a speech act is relevant for its
inclusion in one category or another only if the mental state and the speech act at
hand share the same content. A feature common to all the problematic cases of ex-
pression given in this Section is that the contents of the mental state expressed and
of the speech acts were distinct. It is therefore crucial to understand how exactly
speech act content can be defined on grounds independent from the notion of ex-
pression (cf. Kissine 2011). Searle (1969) and Alston (2000) assume that the con-
tent p and the illocutionary force F of any literal and direct speech act F(p) are
determined by the linguistic meaning of the sentence used. This view has been
extensively criticised and discussed (e.g. Recanati 1987: 219–244, 2003; Carston
2002: 30–42, 64–70), and I will not reiterate these arguments here.
In any event, mental state expression, even constrained in this way, does not
always yield satisfactory classifications. Imagine that I taste a dish and utter (6),
with a facial expression clearly characteristic of a spontaneous expression of dis-
gust (see also Siebel 2003).
(6) I find this disgusting.
It would be pragmatically odd to add, “But I’m not disgusted by this”, and intu-
itions are strong that by my utterance of (6) I expressed disgust. So, (6) should
be an expressive. The object of my disgust, however, is not the proposition [I find
this food disgusting] – what would be the content of (6) – but the food itself. The
mental state expressed would be something like D ISGUST (food).19 If the content of
the relevant mental state expressed is constrained by sentence meaning, (6) should
be the expression of S’s belief that she finds the food disgusting – the mental state
expressed would thus be B ELIEF (S finds the food disgusting). When the perform-
ance of a speech act F1(p1) constitutes the performance of a second speech act
F2(p2), this second speech act is said to be indirect (Searle 1975a). For instance, if
by saying “It’s hot in here”, I request you to open the window, my request is indi-
rect. Getting back to (6), Searle’s view compels us to assume that (6) is a direct
expression of my belief that I find the food disgusting, and an indirect expression

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186 Mikhail Kissine

of disgust. Yet, my own intuition is that things actually go the other way around. By
(6) I directly express my disgust; the fact that I believe that I am disgusted by the
food is side information, indirectly conveyed.

3.4. Expression as intentional communication

According to Bach & Harnish (1979) an utterance u counts as expressing the
mental state (p) if, and only if, this utterance is produced with the intention that
A takes u as reason to believe that S entertains (p), and does so because he
recognises that u was performed with this very intention. This Gricean notion of
expression serves, in Bach and Harnish’s theory, as a classificatory principle;
once A has identified the mental state S expressed by her utterance, he knows
which type of speech act S performed. Constatives express S’s intentions to make
A believe that p is true and/or that S’s belief p is true; directives express S’s de-
sires, intentions or wishes that A bring about the truth of p; commissives express
S’s intentions to bring about the truth of p (and the belief that her utterance com-
mits her to do so); what Bach and Harnish call acknowledgements express feel-
ings towards A. (As we have seen earlier, Bach and Harnish put institutional
speech acts – which they divide into verdictives and effectives – aside, arguing
that in order to correctly understand the force of such speech acts, one does not
need to recognise the mental state expressed.)
Bach and Harnish’s account of expression seems to solve the problems outlined
in the previous Section. For instance, in ordering you to leave the room, I intend
that you believe that I want you to leave the room, and that you believe it because
you realise that this was my intention in performing my utterance; but, arguably,
I do not intend, in the same “reflexive” way, that you take my utterance to be a rea-
son to believe that I believe that it is possible for you to leave the room.
However, take (6). Bach and Harnish’s acknowledgments are restricted to the
expression of feelings that are directed at A; the expression of disgust in (6) cannot
be anything else than a constative under this definition. It makes much more sense
to assume that I intend my utterance of (6) to be a reason for you to believe (and to
do so because you recognise my intention) that I find the food disgusting, rather
than postulating that in uttering (6) I intend to give a reason to believe (and to do so
because you recognise my intention) that I believe that I find the food is disgusting.
In other words, (6) is more an expression of disgust than an expression of the belief
that I find the food disgusting. It remains possible to argue that (6) is an indirect ex-
pressive speech act, and just a constative at the direct level, but for reasons alluded
to earlier (Section 3.3), such a strategy is quite counter-intuitive.
A more serious problem is that Bach and Harnish construe their definition of
expression – and of illocutionary force recognition – as a kind of Gricean non-
natural meaning (see Green, 2007: 61–63, 105). Soliloquies constitute the classical
counter-example to such accounts. For instance, in the absence of any audience, it

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 Speech act classifications 187

is highly doubtful that the speaker of (7) intends her utterance to be a constative
speech act.
(7) [S looks at her window, and says to herself:] It’s raining again.
Yet, there is a clear feeling that S expresses her belief that it is raining (perhaps
together with, say, her exasperation with respect to the content of this belief.) It
might be argued that S addresses a fictive addressee (perhaps the other half of her
divided self), and so keeps successfully performing an assertive speech act. Yet,
there are two reasons why the putative existence of a fictive audience does not dis-
pose of such scenarios. First, as argued by Green (2007: 62), it is fully rational for
S to think that if there were an audience, her utterance would have a certain effect
on that audience, and to believe, at the same time, that there is no one to hear and
to interpret this utterance. Second, while it is possible to argue that in (7) the
addressee is S’s other half of her divided self, such an analysis would obliterate the
difference between (8) and (9).
(8) [S, speaking to herself:] I am so stupid!
(9) [S, speaking to herself:] You’re so stupid!
By expressing certain mental states in cases like (8–9), S operates a dissociation
that can be beneficial from a social, emotional or memory point of view (e.g. Goff-
man 1981: 78–99; Dennett 1991: 300–303; Green 2007: 62–63). However, this
does not imply that all such utterances must be analysed as a literal self-addressed
constative (assertive) speech act.
Intuitions are even stronger that (10) is uttered without instantiating the kind of
reflexive intention that characterises, according to Bach and Harnish, expression
through language.
(10) [S, who is eating alone, tastes the food, spits it out and exclaims to herself:]
This is disgusting!
Intuitively, an utterance like (10) should be classified as an expressive speech act.
Yet, (10) does not meet Bach and Harnish’s conditions for being an instance of dis-
gust expression (nor for being included within their class of acknowledgments).
One solution is to claim that soliloquies are not illocutionary acts at all (Kis-
sine, 2009). Another is to opt for a notion of expression that is not based on Gricean
intention attribution. For example, according to Davis (2003), expressing a mental
state Y by performing an utterance amounts to performing this utterance as an in-
dication of the occurrence of Y, and without covertly simulating an unintentional
indication of the same kind. If indication is understood as making the indicated
thing potentially accessible, viz. without entailing that it is actually accessible to
anyone, then Davis’s definition does classify soliloquies as expressions of mental
states. (The same holds for Green (2007), except that for him a non-sincere utter-
ance of, for instance, (4) would not count as expression of disgust.)20

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188 Mikhail Kissine

Note, however, that in order to be used for classificatory purposes, Davis’s defi-
nition of expression must be supplemented with an independent criterion for iden-
tifying the speech act content. After all, a directive speech act can be performed as
an indication of a belief. For instance, I can order you to leave the room, intending
my order to be an indication of the fact that I am not afraid of you anymore (and
without covertly simulating an unintentional indication of this fact). But the belief
thus expressed has not the same content as my order.

3.5. Directives and desires

We have seen that Searle introduced mental state expression as a classificatory
principle in order to distinguish between directives and commissives. His notion of
expression requires an independent criterion to delimit speech act content. Bach
and Harnish’s definition of expression, by contrast, automatically determines the
content of the speech act performed. However, as we have just seen, their concep-
tion of expression makes this classificatory principle too strong.
It is important to note that the notion of mental state expression is perhaps not
best suited for circumscribing a class of directive speech acts. The reason is that it
is not entirely clear that directive speech acts, especially orders, express desires,
and/or have sincerity conditions at all.21 For instance, a general may order his
troops to attack without having the desire that they attack and risk their life. Arm-
strong (1971) takes such an order to be insincere. But this is far from being obvious
(see also Heal 1976–1977). Many of our intentions (and reasons to act) are desire-
independent (cf. Searle 2001), and the intention to perform a directive speech act
can be one of such. (The general may have the desire to win the battle or to obey his
superiors, which underlies his intention to order his troops to attack; however, this
does not imply that he has the desire that his troops attack; see also note 14.)
A potential objection is that, although it may happen that, when ordering that p,
S does not have the desire that p, this is a deviant case, similar to the one where, for
some reasons, S is forced to assert something she does not believe (as could be the
case for a double agent, Dominicy, p.c.). But take the following examples, used by
Tsohatzidis (1994) to argue that Moorean unacceptability does not suffice to estab-
lish the link between speech acts and mental state expression.
(11) I don’t want you to do this dirty job, but since you are alone capable of doing
it, and since it is tremendously important for the country, I request of you to do
it.
(12) I don’t believe John is in pain, but since he says he is, and since his words
would be admitted as the best kind of evidence for settling a question of this
kind, I assert that he is.
To my mind, (11) is way more acceptable than (12). To be acceptable, (12) must
receive an “echoic” (Sperber and Wilson 1981) or a “polyphonic” (Ducrot 1984)

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 Speech act classifications 189

reading: S endorses her assertion that someone is in pain only with respect to a
norm where John’s words count as the best kind of evidence. But it is also clear that
S herself does not adhere to this norm, so she herself does not take her assertion to
be grounded. In case John’s own words do not count as the best evidence for be-
lieving that he is in pain, S would readily retract her assertion. Compare with (11).
Here, S simply states that her request has desire independent reasons, but she also
fully endorses her request, as well as the corresponding norms, viz. the country’s
needs.
Bach and Harnish (1979) are immune to the problem just raised, because they
define the class of directives disjunctively as being the expression of the desire or
the intention that A make the propositional content true. However, since commis-
sives express intentions too, the distinction between directives and commissives
should then be made on the basis of the content of the intention expressed: that A
render the propositional content true and that S render the propositional content
true, respectively. However, this solution entails an asymmetry at the level of con-
tents. When I promise you to come to your party, the intention expressed has the
same content as my promise: ‘Mikhail comes to your party’. When I order you to
leave the room, according to Bach and Harnish, I express the desire that you make
it the case that you leave the room. But the content of my order is not that you make
it the case that you leave the room, but that you leave the room. The reason for this
is simple. Let p be the content of my order. In performing the order with the content
p, I express, according to Bach and Harnish, the desire/the intention that A make it
the case that p. Hence, if the content of my order were that A bring about the truth
of p, then my order expresses the desire or the intention that A make it the case that
A make it the case that p. That is, directives and the mental states that define them
do not have the same content. This entails that the propositional content of direc-
tives cannot be equated with that of the mental state they express.

4. Criteria related to linguistic form

As mentioned above, Searle (1969) and Alston (2000) argue that speech act con-
tents are entirely determined by the linguistic structure of the sentence uttered. In
fact, they also endorse the view that the literal meaning of a sentence type corre-
sponds to the speech act any literal and direct utterance of this sentence would con-
stitute. Such a rationale thus entails that a classification of speech acts can be made
on the basis of linguistic structure alone (see also Kannetzky 2002).
Interestingly, a reason often invoked for a linguistically based classification
is precisely the lack of correspondence between more philosophically oriented
classifications – such as Searle’s – and linguistic typology. For instance, virtually
no language possesses a form dedicated to commissives,22 which are realised by
grammatically declarative sentences, exactly like constatives. By contrast, ques-

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190 Mikhail Kissine

tions are classified as requests for information, that is, as directives by Searle
(1975b) and Bach and Harnish (1979). Yet, most, if not all, languages have distinct
linguistic features associated with interrogatives (e.g. König and Siemund 2007).
With this kind of rationale in mind, Sadock and Zwicky (1985) distinguish
three major sentence types: declarative, imperative and interrogative. Major sen-
tence types represent mutually exclusive forms conventionally associated with a
certain illocutionary force. Their claim is that the three major sentence types are
found universally across world’s languages.
If one wants to establish speech act taxonomy on the basis of sentence types, the
restriction to these major sentence types is commanded by the requirement of cross-
linguistic generalisation. With the exception of institutional speech acts (and per-
haps of some “social” expressives like acknowledgments), the successful perform-
ance of a speech act does not depend on group-specific conventions or institutions.
Speech acts are thus forms of communicative behaviour proper to the human
species. In other words, an accurate speech act classification should transcend the
peculiarities of actual natural languages. The problem is that the morpho-syntactic
system of one language may feature fine-grained speech act distinctions that are not
grammatically coded in another. For instance, some languages have a morphologi-
cal optative mood, dedicated to the expression of wishes. Such sentence types are
functionally and morpho-syntactically distinct from imperatives, subjunctives or in-
dicatives. However, within a sample of 319 languages, listed by Dobrushina et al.
(2005), only 48 have an optative system. Therefore, from a typologically oriented
point of view, treating wish expression as a distinct speech act class either implies
that this type is realised only indirectly in most languages, or that it exists in some
languages only – two unattractive perspectives. For this reason, it makes sense to
consider the optative mood as a determining a minor sentence type, which should
not be taken into account for establishing a cross-linguistic speech act taxonomy.
But even then, basing speech act classification on the three major sentence
types – declaratives, imperatives, and interrogatives – faces serious challenges in
both directions. On the one hand, there are many languages that do not have a spe-
cific sentence type associated with directive speech acts. In the 522 language
sample analysed by van der Auwera and Lejeune (2005), 122 have no morphologi-
cal imperative at all. An often-quoted example is the Australian language Nunggu-
buyu, where directives are formally undistinguishable from future indicatives
(Heath 1984), but lack of morphological imperative seems to be an widespread fea-
ture in languages spoken in South-East Asia and in the Khosian family (van der
Auwera and Lejeune 2005).
On the other hand, some languages have morpho-syntactically homogenous
hortative-imperative paradigms (van der Auwera, Dobrushina and Goussev 2005,
see Croft 1994 for similar points). That is, in these languages the same grammati-
cal types are used to issue directive speech acts directed at the addressee (“Go”),
and requests addressed at a third person (“Let him go”). (While the former are tra-

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 Speech act classifications 191

ditionally called “imperative”, the latter are more often dubbed “hortative” or
“jussive”, rather than “third-person imperatives”.) For instance, in Mongolian
(Kuzmenkov 2001), the verb bears no morphological marking of person or number,
except in imperative/hortative constructions. To be sure, one may relax the defini-
tion of the directive force in order to group together requests directed to any person,
and not specifically to the addressee (Birjulin and Xrakovski 2001). In such a way,
both imperatives and hortatives would belong to the category of directive speech
acts. However, in many languages such a categorisation would not be linguistically
motivated, for the equivalents of hortative forms should be classified as instances
of the declarative sentence type. For instance, in French, third-person directed
requests are in subjunctive mood. Yet, formally, the French subjunctive clearly be-
longs to the declarative sentence type. While in French the presence of an overt
subject is not allowed in imperative sentences, it is compulsory in both main-clause
subjunctives and indicatives. Furthermore, while pronouns encliticise in imperative
clauses, the situation is exactly opposite in subjunctive and indicative clauses
(13) * Le fais. / Fais-le.
* it do-IMP 2 p. sg. / do-IMP 2 p. sg.-it
‘Do it.’
(14) Qu’ il le fasse. /* Qu’ il fasse le.
COMPL. he it do-SUBJ. PR. 3 p. sg. /*COMPL. he do-SUBJ. PR. 3 p. sg. it
‘Let him do it’
(15) Il le fait. / *Il fait le.
he it do-IND. PR. 3 p. sg. / *he do-IND. PR. 3 p. sg.it
‘He does/is doing it’.
Croft (1994: 469) argues that hortatives belong to a functional continuum “be-
tween forms of deontic modality which impose some obligation on the addressee
to perform an action and an imperative in which specifically the speaker imposes a
strong requirement that the addressee act […]”. If this suggestion is taken as a clas-
sificatory criterion (which is not Croft’s intention, I hasten to add), both (16) and
(17) would count as direct directive speech acts.
(16) Leave now.
(17) You should leave now.
Yet, the request in (17) clearly belongs to a non-imperative sentence type: for in-
stance, A may leave saying “Yes, I should”. Moreover, only (17) can be followed
by an inverted polarity tag-question:
(18) You should leave now, shouldn’t you.
Recall, now, Millikan’s idea that major sentence types share the same function: for
indicatives, the function of causing beliefs; for imperatives, the function of causing
actions (Subsection 2.3.2). It appears from the foregoing that no match between

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192 Mikhail Kissine

sentence type and illocutionary act types would be viable cross-linguistically.

Therefore, the validity of a speech act classification based on linguistic form would
be, at best, restricted to some human languages only. But even such a modest en-
terprise is unlikely to succeed. Many literal and direct utterances of imperative sen-
tences do not correspond to the performance of directive speech acts; many inter-
rogative ones are not used to ask questions; and many indicative sentences, as
literal and direct as they can be, do not constitute assertive speech acts (see Wilson
and Sperber 1988; Dominicy and Franken 2002; Fiengo 2007; Kissine 2013). As
cogently argued by Fiengo (2007), the conventional meanings of sentence types
must be carefully distinguished from facts about their use. The former belong to
language knowledge; the latter to the conventions of language use. What an ad-
equate theory must do is to explain why certain sentence types are suitable for the
performance of some illocutionary act types. For instance, in Bach and Harnish’s
(1979; Harnish 1994) view, linguistic mood is associated with certain types of
mental state expression through “compatibility conditions”. As we have seen
above (Section 3.4), in their view expressions of mental states are associated with
speech acts. Indirectly, their classification is thus linguistically based; however, it
does not posit a one-to-one relationship – it admits the possibility that a single sen-
tence type may correspond to several possible illocutionary acts (see, particularly,
Harnish 1994).

5. Conclusion

Speech acts are actions of a certain kind – the hard bit is to decide which kind. Tak-
ing such a decision is intimately intertwined with the speech act classification one
endorses. I have done little more than a superficial survey of three main classifica-
tory principles; but each raises challenges whose importance goes beyond the tax-
onomic enterprise.
First, institutional speech acts may be put apart from the rest. This, as we have
seen, calls either for a sufficiently fine-grained definition of convention or for a
definition of institutional speech acts that does not overgenerate. Second, when the
notion of expression is used as a taxonomic criterion, two sub-cases are to be dis-
tinguished. If one relies on a weak notion of expression, speech act content must be
defined independently – which poses new challenges. If the definition of ex-
pression is strong enough to determine both the class of the speech act at hand and
its content, some cases, naturally felt to be expressions of mental states, cannot be
classified as such. Third, while the linguistic form of a sentence constrains the
range of speech acts that can be (directly and literally) performed by uttering this
sentence, it is illusory to seek a one-to-one correspondence between sentence-
types and illocutionary act types. Figure 1 is an attempt to summarise the main
classificatory principles addressed here and their problems.

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 Speech act classifications 193

Figure 1: Some classificatory principles and some problems

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194 Mikhail Kissine

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marc Dominicy, two anonymous reviewers, Marina Sbisà and
Ken Turner for useful remarks on a draft of this chapter. The research presented
here was supported by a post-doctoral research grant from the F.R.S.-FNRS (Fonds
de la Recherche Scientifique, Communauté française de Belgique).

Notes

1. I will use the terms speech acts and illocutionary acts interchangeably.
2. For an alternative take on the illocutionary/perlocutionary distinction, see Dominicy
(2008) and Kissine (2008b, 2009, 2013: chapter 1).
3. As can be seen from Table 1, following Austin, Bach and Harnish distinguish between
two kinds of conventional speech acts: effectives (partly equivalent to Austin’s exerci-
tives) and verdictives. While effectives create a new institutional fact, verdictives assign
an institutional status to a natural fact. Within the institutional framework of a company,
a certain utterance of an employee will count as resigning; by performing such a conven-
tional illocutionary act, the employee creates a new fact – she no longer belongs to the
company. Resigning would thus be an effective. As for verdictives, the clearest example is
the judge’s pronouncing Smith guilty of murder. Here the conventional illocutionary act
assigns an institutional status to a natural fact. In absence of an adequate conventional
framework, the judge’s utterance would be an assertion – one can assert that Smith is
guilty without intending to produce an institutionally binding effect (such as making
Smith a convicted felon). Austin (1975: 153) thus notes that a verdictive can be true or
false, or fair or unfair. The judge might be wrong in declaring Smith guilty, because Smith
did not act so. By contrast, outside the adequate framework, the employee’s saying “I re-
sign” would not count as a felicitous assertion, for her utterance is not describing an in-
stitution-independent natural fact.
4. Actually, matters are more complicated than that. The claim is rather that every intention
is formed with respect to a certain set of beliefs, and that, with respect to this set, its prob-
ability to succeed is maximal. For a more extensive discussion bearing on intentions and
commissive speech acts, see Kissine (2008a, 2013: chapters 2 and 6).
5. On indirect speech acts, see Sbisà, this volume, Subsection 4.2.3.1 and Kissine (2013:
chapter 3). On indirect requests, see Walker, this volume.
6. See Kissine (2008a, 2011) for a critical discussion.
7. Strictly speaking this definition excludes Austin’s verdictives (cf. note 2); however,
Searle (1975b: 19–20) notes that some declarative speech acts – e.g., the judge declaring
someone guilty – are, simultaneously, assertions.
8. Note that it is also necessary that you leave the room with my order as a reason; likewise,
a promise is kept if, and only if, the speaker performs the promised action because she
promised to do so. This is the reason why Searle (1975b) adds “causal” constraints bear-
ing on the world-to-word direction of fit of speech acts. For a critical discussion of the
notion of direction of fit, see Kissine (2013: chapter 2).
9. In Bach and Harnish’s view, performatives are standardised indirect speech acts (on their
notion of standardisation, see Bach and Harnish 1979: chapter 10; Bach, 1998). Recanati

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 Speech act classifications 195

(1987) and Reimer (1995) object to this account that performative utterances do not cor-
respond to a direct constative speech act. Reimer (1995) offers an alternative account,
based on the putative existence of specific illocutionary conventions. Like Bach and
Harnish, Recanati (1987) treats explicit performatives as indirect speech acts; however,
in his view, at the direct level they are declarative speech acts (in Searle’s sense), and not
assertives (constatives), as Bach and Harnish would have it. In Kissine (2012), I argued
that performative utterances have a truth-conditional content at the locutionary level,
but are neither direct nor indirect constatives. For recent surveys of this debate, see Har-
nish (2002, 2004).
10. Marc Dominicy pointed out that these two cases differ with respect to negation. The ne-
gation of a performative, like “I don’t promise to come”, does not result in a contradic-
tion; according to Searle and Vanderveken (e.g., 1985b), it is an instance of illocution-
ary negation. By contrast, “I am not speaking now” is always false in the world of
utterance. This reveals that in “I am speaking now” self-verification is due to the prop-
ositional content, whereas in a performative utterance (or an institutional declaration), it
stems from the illocutionary force. Nevertheless, the utterance of “I am speaking now”
creates the fact that fits its content – which is Searle’s definition of declarations.
11. I should stress that I disagree with Millikan’s analyses of mood. At this point, however,
Millikan’s analysis only matters as far as it illustrates her biological theory of linguistic
communication.
12. See also Sbisà (2007).
13. The partisans of linguistically based classifications, to be discussed in Section 3.3, deny
the existence of a separate class of commissives. However, in such taxonomies com-
missives must belong to the same category as constatives. Pak, Portner, and Zanuttini
(forthcoming) argue that Korean has a “promissive” particle that belongs to the same
syntactic category as the second person imperative particle. It should be noted, however,
that both particles embed, which makes it questionable whether the promissive is really
a first-person imperative. Furthermore, Pak et al.’s analysis presupposes that on the
speech act level commissives can be treated as first-person directed directives.
14. One might object, however, that while the mental states of the judge qua an individual
are irrelevant, his beliefs and desires qua judge, viz. part of a complex social reality, do
determine the success of the judgement. I leave the discussion of this complex issue for
another occasion.
15. I put aside here the fact that Searle and Vanderveken also include performative utter-
ances within the class of declaratives (cf. above, Subsection 2.2.1).
16. Thanks to Marc Dominicy for drawing my attention to this point.
17. For an important application of this Principle, see Dominicy and Franken (2002).
18. It might be objected that the “while I fix the lamp bulb” part does not belong to the di-
rective speech act content. Not so. What I ask you is not to hold the ladder, period, but to
hold the ladder while I fix the lamp bulb. Holding the ladder at another moment amounts
to disobeying.
19. On object-directed expression, see Green (2007).
20. Green (2007: 69–75, 2009) develops a distinct account of mental state expression
through the performance of certain speech acts. According to him, assertive speech acts
express beliefs because their performance makes S liable to sanction for having erred or
for not having sufficient grounds for believing that the propositional content is true.
Such speech acts are, in Green’s view, handicaps, in the biological sense of the term.

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196 Mikhail Kissine

A handicap is a behaviour or a physical characteristic that functions as a reliable fitness

indicator because it is difficult to fake (cf. Zahavi and Zahavi, 1997). To take a stock
example, the peacock’s large tail reliably indicates its fitness, because a large tail handi-
caps the peacock in a number of vital situations (e.g., finding food or fleeing predators).
Green argues that the cost S is likely to pay if her assertive speech act is false makes
assertive speech acts signs of beliefs, in the same way as the peacock’s tail is a sign of
fitness. By asserting that p, S displays her readiness to incur the cost of her assertion
being false – and this, argues Green, is a reliable indicator of her believing that p. I post-
pone the discussion of this theory to another occasion; within the scope of the present
article, suffice it to say that such a notion of expression does not extend to all kinds of
speech acts, and so does not seem well suited for speech act classification.
21. Thanks to Mitch Green for drawing my attention to this point.
22. Korean is a potential exception (e.g. Lee 1988; Pak, Portner and Zanuttini forthcoming),
and note 13.

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