Speech Acts, Speakers and Hearers

This study is an inquiry into the pragmatics of speaker and hearer reference. It falls into a theory-based and a description-based part. The former covers three topics: (a) the categories of speaker and hearer as opposed to the category of nonparticipants in the speech act; (b) the interactional roles of speaker and hearer as defined by the illocutionary point of the speech act and the preconditions underlying its successful performance; (c) the decomposition of the speech act as a model for des