Speech acts have both locutionary content (what is literally said) and illocutionary force (what the speaker is doing: asserting, commanding, questioning). The same content can be expressed with different forces, determined partly by syntactic mood and partly by context and intention.
From Austin and Searle, you know that utterances are not just truth-apt propositions—they are *acts*. When you say "I promise to return," you're not describing a promise; you're making one. The illocutionary act is what you are doing with language: asserting, promising, requesting, warning, commanding, congratulating. Every speech act has both a propositional content—what it is about—and an illocutionary force—what act is being performed with that content. These two dimensions are largely independent, and that independence is the central insight of this topic.
The same content can carry different forces. "You will close the door" can be an assertion (I'm telling you what will happen), a prediction (same content, slightly different epistemic stance), a command (I'm telling you to do it), or a performative declaration (in the right institutional context, I hereby mandate it). What changes is not the proposition about door-closing but the speech act being performed. Conversely, different contents can carry the same force: "Get out," "Would you please leave," "I'd appreciate your leaving," and "It's getting late" can all function as requests or indirect commands, with different propositional contents but the same illocutionary point.
Syntactic mood is the primary grammatical signal of force: declaratives default to assertions, interrogatives to questions, imperatives to commands. But mood is only a defeasible signal, not a guarantee. "Can you pass the salt?" is grammatically a question about your ability, but it functions as a request—an indirect speech act. Searle's account of indirect speech acts explains this via a two-step process: the hearer recognizes the literal force (a question), recognizes that it can't be the primary force given the context, and infers the intended illocutionary force (a request) by Gricean cooperation. Context—shared knowledge, institutional roles, tone, prior discourse—determines which inference to draw.
The force/content distinction matters practically because misreading it causes real communicative failures. A judge who hears "Would you like to approach the bench?" as a genuine question about preferences has misread the force. A student who hears "That's an interesting interpretation" as sincere praise rather than polite skepticism has misread the force. What makes speech act theory powerful is that it provides systematic tools—felicity conditions, force indicators, background institutional context—for diagnosing which act is being performed, even when the surface form is misleading. This is why the distinction between what is *said* (locutionary content) and what is *done* (illocutionary force) is foundational for any serious analysis of how language functions in real communicative contexts.
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