The classification of speech acts revisited: a dialogical and actional perspective

Austin was the first to see the need to classify speech acts.Searle put forward a classification of primitive illocutionary acts.However, Searle's classification remains dependent upon amonological, representational, and merely semantic conception oflanguage. This article (i) points out the main weaknesses of Searle'staxonomy, (ii) draws the main lines of a dialogical approach tospeech acts as it results from a praxiological conception ofcommunication, (iii) presents a simpler and more coherentclassification of speech acts based on the progressive and explicitintroduction of four criteria, and (iv) explores the heuristic valueand limits of the proposed classification.