This introductory work consists of two parts. In the first part, the most important aspects of analytic speech act theory are described and discussed. A central part of this is defining a general concept of human action and the question of how we communicatively handle actions. In the second part of the introduction, the basic assumptions of a theory of speech acts are discussed based on the speech act theories by Austin and Searle, as well as on Grice's communication theory.

Gisela Harras ist Professorin für germanistische Linguistik an der Universität Mannheim und wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in der Abteilung Lexik am Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim.