Speech Act Vocabulary: does Hyponymy Recapitulate Polysemy? AAAI Spring Symposium: Representation and Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge: Polysemy Ambiguity and Generativity

The words here are surprisingly numerous (e.g. there are up to 1,000 such terms in English, whereas not more than a tenth as many words denote kinds of perception). They give rise to a classificatory network, one which is to a tantalizing extent organizable on a hierarchical principle (witness the attractiveness of taxonomic approaches, as Searle and Vanderveken 1985), but which also highlights the fact that families of words systematically cross the boundaries between classes (e.g. argue/warn/advise/suggest~propose/ urge/remind/tell used as asserfives or directives, admit/allow/accept as assertives or permissives, swear/ promise/vow/undertake as assertives or commissives).