37.2137, Reviews: Speech Act Theory: Stavros Assimakopoulos (2026)

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Subject: 37.2137, Reviews: Speech Act Theory: Stavros Assimakopoulos (2026)

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Date: 22-Jun-2026
From: Anastasiia Petrenko [ap2315 at cam.ac.uk]
Subject: Stavros Assimakopoulos (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-767

Title: Speech Act Theory
Subtitle: Between Narrow and Broad Pragmatics
Series Title: Elements in Pragmatics
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/ch/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/semantics-and-pragmatics/speech-act-theory-between-narrow-and-broad-pragmatics?format=HB&isbn=9781009539357

Author(s): Stavros Assimakopoulos

Reviewer: Anastasiia Petrenko

This book, “Speech Act Theory: Between Narrow and Broad Pragmatics” by
Stavros Assimakopoulos, is a recent and substantial contribution to
the studies of pragmatics and speech acts. Rather than offering
another textbook overview of speech acts, the author focuses on the
relationships between speech act theory and the Anglo-American and
Continental European pragmatic traditions. He argues that the current
position has significantly drifted away from Austin’s original vision
and represents a narrow conception of speech acts, and that embracing
the broad take on the theory would allow for the reintegration of that
original vision.
SUMMARY
The book consists of eight sections, which can be grouped into three
main clusters: (i) foundational approaches to and methodological
comments on speech act theory; (ii) a historical overview of speech
act theory, from Austin’s original work to the contemporary view;
(iii) a critical evaluation of this contemporary view, together with a
proposal to revise speech acts as context-driven actions. Taken
together, these sections provide a coherent progression from Austin’s
initial outline of the theory to the reevaluation of its current
standing in linguistics, and in pragmatics in particular.
Sections 1-3: Laying the groundwork for speech act theory
The opening sections introduce readers to the fundamentals of speech
act theory. Section 1 serves as an introduction, introducing key
principles and approaches adopted in this book. The author argues
that, although speech act theory is unanimously credited with having
given birth to modern pragmatics (and then sociopragmatics) as an
independent field, speech act studies are massively empirical, leaving
a number of theoretical gaps. This work, by contrast, aims to focus on
the explanatory power of speech act theory and shift the perspective
on it from the narrow scope to the broad one. The author also directs
readers to another book in the Element series ‘Speech acts:
Discursive, Multimodal, Diachronic’ by Andreas Jucker (2024), which is
one of the recent empirical works on speech act theory that
complements the current theoretical study.
In Section 2, the author investigates and explains the two takes on
the scope of pragmatics that pave the way for the following
discussion. He finds the geographical labels ‘Anglo-American’ and
‘Continental European’ misleading and instead adopts the terms
‘component’ (narrow) and ‘perspective’ (broad) views, following
Haberland and Mey (1977) and Verschueren (1987) (Assimakopoulos 2025:
3). The narrow view treats pragmatics as a component complementing the
other levels of linguistic analysis, anchored in truth-conditional
content. A pitfall of this view is that pragmatics came to be regarded
as a ‘wastebasket’, following, for example, Bar-Hillel (1971: 405),
which does not seem to fit the syntactic-semantic theory, which in
turn required devising some tools for better examining pragmatic
influence on the meaning. Grice’s works (1975, 1989) significantly
contributed to the standardization of pragmatics, introducing the
terms of implicature (conventional and conversational) and the
speaker’s meaning, which became staples of pragmatics, since they made
it possible to override the linguistic form and to treat pragmatics as
more than a mere complement to semantics, even within a narrow view.
At the same time, the speaker’s meaning served to restrict the scope
of pragmatics as the theory of implicature focused mostly on the
intentions of the speaker; it delimits which meaning-related
inferences need to be taken into account, namely those that matter to
the speaker. As a result, this narrow view acquired a clear object of
investigation and application in terms of intentional verbal
communication. By contrast, the broad view, arising from Morris’s
(1938) and Haberland and Mey’s (1977) works, treats pragmatics as a
functional perspective on language that reinstates socio-cultural and
cognitive considerations. This allowed for including not only aspects
relative to the speaker’s intentions, as in the narrow view, but also
other phenomena, such as politeness, turn taking, etc. Consequently,
the broad scope of pragmatics allowed for treating the speaker-hearer
interaction not in the presupposed settings when they initially hold
some mental states but rather as the co-constructed interaction, which
unfolds over the course of the interaction. This shifted the main
pragmatic question from ‘What does this utterance mean?’ to ‘Why has
this utterance been produced?’ (ibid., p. 8).  The section concludes
that the two positions should be seen as extremes, each with its own
drawbacks, but that both can contribute different aspects to a more
comprehensive description of speech acts.
Section 3 elaborates further on contradictions that exist within the
speech act theory, particularly regarding the classification of speech
acts and models that account for them. The section is rather short,
spanning over a page. It concludes that Austin and Searle are
confusingly treated as a single, mingled position in the traditional
literature as Austin was the first to propose speech act theory, while
Searle, regarded as his follower, significantly developed it, and it
was Searle’s version that was later adopted in linguistics, giving
rise to the narrow view, while a return to Austin’s original work, as
Assimakopoulos suggests, might instead help to adopt a broader view.
Sections 4-5: From Austin to the contemporary view
These central sections constitute the theoretical foundation for the
further revision of speech act theory and are well-developed. Section
4 considers Austin’s original arguments in a much greater detail than
comparable overviews, explaining their nature and contrasting Austin’s
own aims with the goals later pursued within speech act theory in
linguistics. The author emphasizes that Austin did not bear in mind
the development of the pragmatic theory but rather sought to overcome
the restrictions of formal logic in the language meaning analysis and
reasoning. Austin’s central claim was that an utterance might remain
meaningful even when its primary function is distinct from the mere
description of a state of affairs and might instead signal the desire
to perform an action, as in ‘I promise’ or ‘I apologise’. On this
basis, Austin distinguished between constatives and performatives. He
went further, observing that some utterances express their primary
meaning explicitly, while others can do it implicitly, and
acknowledged that the presence of a given verb need not correspond to
a performative character, which I, as a reviewer, find noteworthy,
given how influential Vendler’s (1967) theory of the semantic types of
predicates was at that time, although having its own discrepancies.
Austin also stressed the crucial role of context, noting that two
utterances differing in linguistic form may nonetheless convey the
same meaning. He argued, moreover, that performatives should be
assessed not in terms of whether they are true or false, but in terms
of whether the action the speaker was willing to perform through
uttering this performative was indeed accomplished, thereby overcoming
the restrictions of the truth-conditional semantics. Readers are then
guided through various types of infelicity that arise from the
constative / performative distinction (summarised in Figure 1, ‘The
doctrine of infelicities’, on page 18), each richly illustrated with
diverse examples. In this respect, Austin’s postulates might be seen
as corresponding to what would now be called a broad view, one that is
not widely adopted in the existing literature. Austin soon concludes,
however, that constatives are too subject to felicitous conditions:
for example, a sweeping statistical statement would be considered a
misinvocation, and slips of tongue would be misleading. He concludes
that all utterances should be seen as actions and should be analysed
through the notions and tools of locutionary, illocutionary and
perlocutionary acts. Constatives thus come to be seen as foregrounding
the locutionary level, while the performative utterances would call
for greater attention to the illocutionary force, which allows a
single utterance to carry several illocutionary forces. Austin further
notes that, while illocutionary forces might be explicit by means of a
performative formula, perlocutionary effects cannot be expressed
explicitly in the same way.  The notion of uptake (‘the understanding
of the meaning and of the force of the locution’, adopted from Austin
1975: 117) and five classes of illocutionary forces (verdictives,
exercitives, commissives, behabitives, expositives) are covered. The
section closes by motivating readers, after Sbisà, to perceive
Austin’s ‘How to Do Things with Words’ (1975) as a coherent work,
which strongly supports Austin main claim that all speech acts should
be considered as actions, rather than as the record of an author
changing his mind halfway through.
Section 5 turns to Searle, Austin’s student, who significantly
developed his theory and is considered one of the key figures in
modern linguistics. Searle (1969: 16) defined speech acts as the basic
or minimal unit of linguistic communication. Although it follows from
that statement that every utterance is a sort of speech act, and the
illocutionary force should always be considered when the propositional
content is studied, which made pragmatics an essential part of
linguistic analysis, it led to the narrow take on speech act theory.
Green (2021) accordingly suggests distinguishing semantics and
pragmatics by assigning the study of the contents of speech acts to
the former and that of their force to the latter; this distinction,
derives from Searle rather than Austin, since Searle regarded Austin’s
locution / illocution distinction as faulty. Assimakopoulos offers a
critical review here, shedding more light on why Searle replaced
Austin’s locution with the propositional act and the F(p) formula,
which enabled him to separate the proposition (everything that is
connected to truth values) from additional elements, which are
regarded as illocutionary force. This made it possible to establish
major sentence types, such as declarative, interrogative and
imperative, which, in their turn, determined the major illocutionary
force types. The author also shows how Searle successfully developed
the notion of felicity conditions, seen as constitutive rules of the
speech act. In comparison to Austin, Searle specified not only the
content and illocutionary force but (i) the propositional content
condition, (ii) the preparatory conditions; (iii) the sincerity
condition, and (iv) the essential condition (ibid., p. 30), and he
drew on social differences to explain the distinction between
different speech acts, which is helpfully summarised in Figure 2 on
Page 30. Searle went further and in comparison to Austin, he does not
restrict his taxonomy to studying illocutionary acts but rather
distinguishes between illocutionary verbs and acts, identifying twelve
dimensions of variation, which he then grouped under the three main
criteria: the act’s illocutionary point, direction of fit and
sincerity condition (ibid., p. 31). Assimakopoulos provides readers
with clear examples and explanations to help them differentiate
between these notions. This results in Searle’s classification, which
was extended in comparison to the Austin’s one into five classes:
assertive (or representatives), directives, commissives, expressives
and declarations. Assimakopoulos also elaborates on other
post-Austinian approaches and critically assesses them, guiding
readers through Strawson’s (1964) criticism of Austin’s
conventionalism and offering to treat illocutionary acts in
intentionalist terms by adopting Gricean approaches to the speaker’s
meaning. Another approach to conventional illocutionary acts was
proposed by Bach and Harnish (1979), but this time modified and to be
explored from the inferentialist perspective; here too, Gricean
methods are central, the claim being that pragmatic inference would be
activated by the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s intentions,
regulated by mutual contextual beliefs and communicative presumption.
Finally, Assimakopoulos considers indirect speech acts, returning to
Searle’s distinction between primary and secondary illocutionary acts,
which again rests on Grice’s cooperative principle and the shared
background information; indirect speech acts, he argues, are motivated
by politeness and social norms and thus may acquire a degree of
conventionality. Overall, the comprehensive nature of this review in
this section and the interconnection of different original works with
modern linguist studies make this section a great resource not only
for undergraduates who encounter this topic for the first time but
also postgraduates who need a more critical approach, particularly in
relation to Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) view that speech acts are
redundant, which Assimakopoulos critically assesses.
Sections 6-8: Back to the origins and revising speech act theory
Section 6 advances the central claim of the book that the stagnation
of speech act theory within pragmatics results from adopting the
narrow conception. Nevertheless, speech acts are getting more and more
attention now as they are considered fuzzy entities to be negotiated
in the context, a development that has paved the way for a number of
empirical studies but that sits at odds with Austin’s original view.
Assimakopoulos then again deliberately explains why it resulted in
this way and why Searle’s elaboration of Austin’s classification was
more popular among linguists. He also stresses that to claim that
Searle developed and completed Austin’s postulates should be seen as
wrong as their approaches are completely different. Drawing
extensively on Sbisà’s (2022, 2024) works, the author further argues
that Searle’s reintroduction of propositions and his objectification
of meaning and force are inconsistent with Austin’s own picture, in
which meaning is something dynamic, and that the Gricean conception of
the speaker’s meaning has reduced the recognition of illocutionary
force to a largely categorical exercise while rendering perlocution
irrelevant to pragmatic enquiry. This led to the decrease of interest
in speech acts.
Section 7 then demonstrates how the broad take can help restore and
revise Austin’s approach. For the reader’s convenience, Assimakopoulos
reiterates the main differences in how illocutionary force is treated
across different accounts, such as those of Searle and Levinson. He
gives particular weight to Levinson’s view and its influence on modern
pragmatics, since, for Levinson, people are not quite restricted in
their utterances by their surface forms, which might lead to a
conclusion of eliminating a literal secondary illocution and to see
the indirect act as primary, which will result in the condition under
which sentences might be directly matched with the context and speech
act theory analysis will become entirely pragmatic (see Levinson
1983). This claim is consistent with the top-down approach of broad
pragmatics (ibid., p. 54). Building on these theoretical
considerations, Assimakopoulos proposes to incorporate a notion of
contexts which are regulated by the interaction between the
interlocutor and the social norms. He then provides readers with a
comprehensive overview of different approaches to context and argues
for treating it through the notions of activity type, following
Levinson, and pragmeme, following Mey (2001). By providing readers
with a compelling example set at the grocery store, he shows that when
a customer says ‘That’s a nice one’ in terms of lettuce, the single
utterance accounts for the process of selecting lettuce, requesting it
to be wrapped and undertaking the action of paying for it at the same
time as all the actions are fulfilled, without being further
negotiated. Through this example, it becomes evident that speech acts
heavily rely on the situation context as being social activities. But
Assimakopoulos also provides an example, on page 56, in which the
hearer double-checks the primary meaning of the speaker through asking
a further question ‘Would you like one of those?’. He offers to adopt
Levinson’s theoretical approach to analysing such cases; this approach
is based on the notions of a position, adjacency pair, and preference
organisation. According to this schema, a prototypical request would
require a sequence of four positions. As a result, adopting this
approach allows for a more context-driven approach. This approach, in
turn, is highly relevant for broad pragmatics as it is not restricted
by either statistics or intentions. Consequently, this approach
becomes based on sequencing, conventional understandings and
procedures, which correlates with social behaviour patterns and
conventional reference points, which aligns with Austin’s proposed
conventionalism. The section closes by drawing on evidence from
contemporary literature to show that the current speech act account
influenced the studies and led to some limitations.
Section 8 is presented in the form of a conclusion. The adoption of
broad pragmatics allows for moving beyond the restrictions of sentence
form, its propositional content and the speaker’s intentions on speech
acts, and to recognize that speech acts are context-sensitive, and
that sociocultural and interactional considerations must not be
ignored in the course of the analysis. Thus, this book motivates
readers to shift from the intentionalist approach to the original
ideas of Austin.
EVALUATION
This book provides a clear and well-developed account of speech act
theory, which is often presented not with the focus on the original
ideas of Austin but rather on the ways his student Searle developed
them later on. This work argues that their perspectives are distinct
and should be critically analysed separately. The strength of this
book, therefore, lies in the author’s decision to dedicate more space
than comparable overviews to Austin’s original argumentation, and then
to return to it critically. Assimakopoulos not only summarises it but
he raises questions and problematises it, demonstrating how a theory
whose original exposition was specifically designed to resist a
formal, intentionalist treatment ended up being highly formalised. The
author guides readers through a number of studies published in the
20th century and recently, illustrating how they contributed to the
development of the component and perspective views on speech act
theory.
In detail, the work provides a comprehensive overview of the topic,
taking into account such works as Levinson (1983), Mey (2001) and
Sbisà (2022, 2024), as well as making references to recently-published
empirical research on speech acts (Jucker 2024). What also
distinguishes the present contribution is that it not only brings the
historical overview of pragmatics and speech act theory together,
treating the evolution of the one as a key to the apparent stagnation
of the other, but it also explicitly sets the problems that occur in a
number of studies, foregrounding the divergences between Austin’s and
Searle’s stances. Therefore, the benefit of this approach can be seen
as twofold: on the one hand, it offers readers a more critical
overview; on the other hand, by going through this historical overview
through the lens of the narrow and broad conceptions of pragmatics, it
accounts for why theoretical interest in speech acts has decreased,
something that comparable overviews tend to leave unaddressed.
All theoretical claims are consistently supported by well-chosen
examples. There are also two helpful figures and a summary table,
which make the analytical distinction more transparent and accessible
to a wide readership, ranging from novices in linguistics to
postgraduate students. On the whole, the author achieves his aim. He
shows convincingly that the received view has diverged from Austin and
that the broad conception offers a principled way of reintegrating his
vision, and the argument is sustained coherently across the eight
sections. However, it should be stressed that the author is explicit
that his aim is ‘to motivate rather than present’ such an account
(ibid., p. 63).
Some limitations are, however, found. First of all, the definition of
the expressive that the author provides on p. 34 does not match the
original definition of Searle. Assimakopoulos correctly mentions that
expressives convey psychological states, have no direction of fit, and
the truth of the propositional content is presupposed. But he gives an
example ‘I am so happy that I got my license!’. According to Searle
(1976: 12), when the speaker performs an expressive, she does not try
‘to get the world to match the words nor the words to match the
world’, as a result, ‘the paradigm-expressive verbs in their
performative occurrence will not take ‘that’ clauses but require a
gerundive nominalisation transformation or some other nominal’, which
makes Assimakopoulos’s example faulty. Secondly, Section 3 spans only
over 3 paragraphs and might be included in Section 2 or serve as an
introduction to Section 4. Thirdly, there is repetition on p. 54,
where the phrase ‘the literature should recognise’ is typed twice, and
Mey is misspelled on p. 63.
In sum, this book is a valuable and timely elaboration on speech act
theory for everyone interested in this topic. Whether for readers
seeking a comprehensive overview or for those looking to rethink the
approaches to speech act theory, this work will be of lasting value.
REFERENCES
Assimakopoulos, S. (2025). Speech act theory : between narrow and
broad pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009378376
Austin, John L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua. 1971. Out of the pragmatic wastebasket.
Linguistic Inquiry 2(3): 401 –407.
Bach, Kent & Robert M. Harnish. 1979. Linguistic Communication and
Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Green, Mitchell S. 2021. Speech acts. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 ed.),
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/speech-acts/.
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L.
Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 41 – 58. Reprinted in Grice, 1989, pp. 22 – 40.
Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Haberland, Hartmut & Jacob L. Mey. 1977. Editorial: Linguistics and
pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics 1(1): 1 – 12.
Jucker, Andreas. 2024. Speech Acts: Discursive, Multimodal,
Diachronic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Mey, Jacob L. 2001. Pragmatics: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Morris, Charles. 1938. Foundations of the theory of signs. In Otto
Neumeth, Rudolf Carnap & Charles Morris (eds.) International
Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
pp. 77 – 138.
Sbisà, Marina. 2022. Speech act theory. In Jef Verschueren & Jan-Ola
Östman (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics, 2nd ed. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, pp. 1303 – 1317.
Sbisà, Marina. 2024. Austinian Themes: Illocution, Action, Knowledge,
Truth, and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. 1976. A classification of illocutionary acts. Language
in Society, 5(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500006837
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and
Cognition, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Strawson, Peter F. 1964. Intention and convention in speech acts. The
Philosophical Review 73(4): 439 – 460.
Vendler, Z. (2019). Linguistics in Philosophy / Zeno Vendler. (1st
ed.). Cornell University Press,. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501743726
Verschueren, Jef. 1987. Pragmatics as a Theory of Linguistic
Adaptation. Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Anastasiia Petrenko is a PhD Candidate in Theoretical and Applied
Linguistics at the University of Cambridge where she writes a thesis
on the concept of time and temporal adverbs in different languages and
teaches semantics and pragmatics to undergraduate students.
Anastasiia’s research interests combine semantic and pragmatic
ambiguities, corpus studies, discourse analysis and cross-linguistic
variation.



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