Introduction

In preceding chapters, I have argued that although such terms as requesting, offering, promising, suggesting, and the like, have an undeniable utility to us in informal discussions of what participants are doing in multiturn interactions, they should play no role in accounts of how to go about achieving goals and recognizing the goals of others in interaction. In particular, I have argued that it is a mistake to suppose that the utterances of multiturn interactions should be mapped into actions such as these. Instead, I have claimed that the utterances of such interactions should be mapped into interaction structure conditions and domain predicates reflecting the work they do in the interactions.

However, there exist two classes of utterances which will be thought by some to present significant problems for this theory, namely performative sentences and indirect speech act forms, for in each case, speakers seem to be able to perform actions like making requests, offers, promises, and the like in uttering single sentences. Indeed, Searle (1975) has argued that there exists a set of indirect speech act forms which have developed conventionalized uses as request forms, offer forms, etc.

In this chapter, I shall address the question whether there exists a class of conventionalized indirect speech act forms.