Title: SPEECH ACT THEORY AND SYSTEMIC-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMARS
Speech act theory (Searle 1969) and the phenomena it was developed to account for are reviewed. The paper then reviews systemic- functional descriptions of the same phenomena. The following arguments are presented in relation to these overviews; speech act theory as presented in Searle (1969) did not account for the phenomena it sought to describe; functionally ordered grammars can (and in some cases do) account for these phenomena. Particular attention is paid to "indirect speech acts". The extent to which these can be described without recourse to any devices other than a functionally explicit grammar is discussed.
Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.