Book review of: T. Ballmer, W. Brennenstuhl, Speech Act Classification. A study in the Lexical analysis of English speech activity verbs.

The posthumous publication of J.L. Austin's How to do things with word in 1962 resulted in the creation of a new field of enquiry ~ which Austin sometimes referred to as linguistic phenomenologv. i.e. the investigation of everyday phenomena through their codification in language. In How to do things with words Austin combined the idea of a linguistic phenomenology with the idea of speech as action. This combination has subsequently become extremely influential, especially through the publication of John Searle's contribution to the Austinian ideas in Speech Acts (1969). Speech Acts have become popular not only in philosophy but also in linguistics (Sadock 1974), literary criticism (Ohmann 1970), anthropology (Hymes 1974), sociology (Silverman 1976) and psychology (Clark and Clark 1977).