Traditionally speech act theory has a very restricted subject matter. The speech act scenario is enacted by its two great heroes, “S” and “H”; and it works as follows: S goes up to H and cuts loose with an acoustic blast; if all goes well, if all the appropriate conditions are satisfied, if S's noise is infused with intentionality, and if all kinds of rules come into play, then the speech act is successful and nondefective. After that, there is silence; nothing else happens. The speech act is concluded and S and H go their separate ways. Traditional speech act theory is thus largely confined to single speech acts. But, as we all know, in real life speech acts are often not like that at all. In real life, speech characteristically consists of longer sequences of speech acts, either on the part of one speaker, in a continuous discourse, or it consists, more interestingly, of sequences of exchange speech acts in a conversation, where alternately S becomes H, and H, S.

Now the question naturally arises: Could we get an account of conversations parallel to our account of speech acts? Could we, for example, get an account that gave us constitutive rules for conversations in a way that we have constitutive rules of speech acts? My answer to that question is going to be “No.” But we can say some things about conversations; we can get some sorts of interesting insights into the structure of conversations.