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The idea of speech acts has its roots in the Philosophy of Language.
The idea of speech acts has its roots in the Philosophy of Language. J. A. Austin ([Aus96]) was the first one who wanted to capture the fact that there is more in the function of language than semantics. Traditionally, mapping of entities of a proposition onto referents and defining the truth value of a proposition was the major area of interest in language semantics. With Austin, and his follower J. R. Searle, there is a shift towards the events or acts that occur via language, hence the name ``speech acts''. These acts effect changes both in the observable world, as well as in the mental states of dialogue participants. Austin's approach introduces pragmatics in studying and modeling language. Consequently, the focus is now on utterances and not propositions.
Note: How can a truth value be assigned to the utterance ``Submit the answers to the exercises to Alexander Koller''? Is the utterance true or false?
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