This book unites speech act theory and conversation analysis to advance a theory of conversational competence.This study proposes a new theory of speech acts, Dynamic Speech Act Theory. It is predicated on the assumption that speech act theory, if it is to be of genuine empirical and theoretical significance, must be embedded within a general theory of conversational competence capable of accounting for how we do things with words in naturally occurring conversation, and it synthesises traditional speech act theory, conversation analysis, and artificial intelligence research in natural language processing.This study proposes a new theory of speech acts, Dynamic Speech Act Theory. It is predicated on the assumption that speech act theory, if it is to be of genuine empirical and theoretical significance, must be embedded within a general theory of conversational competence capable of accounting for how we do things with words in naturally occurring conversation, and it synthesises traditional speech act theory, conversation analysis, and artificial intelligence research in natural language processing.This study proposes a new theory of speech acts, Dynamic Speech Act Theory. It is predicated on the assumption that speech act theory, if it is to be of genuine empirical and theoretical significance, must be embedded within a general theory of conversational competence capable of accounting for how we do things with words in naturally occurring conversation, and it synthesizes traditional speech act theory, conversation analysis, and artificial intelligence research in natural language processing.1. The nature of speech acts; 2. Meaning and force; 3. The structure of communicative interactions; 4. Interactional effects; 5. Indirect speech acts; 6. Conventions of use; 7. The structure of conversation; 8. Utterance generation; References; Index. ...gives the reader the whole picture from the beginning. Inge Egner, Notes on Linguistics ...much of interest on speech act lc"