Speech acts in a semiotic frame

Abstract

The performance of speech acts requires interpretive conditions that are best conceived within a semiotic frame. Three variables within these interpretive conditions are considered: (1) the options permitted or suggested by the structure of the discourse, (2) the degree to which illocutionary force is made explicit, and (3) the definition of the situation. Each of these suggests promising lines of confluence for the speech‐acts perspective and the rhetorical tradition, both of which focus on the pragmatic uses of codes.