The production and perception of implicit performatives

The present research examined how people perform and perceive implicit performatives, i.e., speech acts that do not contain the performative verb. In Experiment 1 participants were asked how they would perform various speech acts (e.g., beg, brag, blame) when they could not use the performative verb. Consistent with speech act theory, utterances were frequently performed by referencing the relevant felicity conditions for the appropriate illocutionary points. Experiments 2 (using a sorting task) and 3 (using a rating task) examined the psychological reality of Searle's [Searle, John, 1979. Expression and Meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge] speech act classification scheme. Both experiments suggest that people tend to group implicit performatives in terms of their underlying emotional valence (a perlocutionary effect) rather than their illocutionary points.