Doing More Than One Thing in Saying: A Pluralist Approach to Illocutionary Force

Summary By challenging the classical assumption of a one-to-one correspondence between an utterance and an illocutionary act, this paper surveys a variety of approaches to illocutionary pluralism, all converging on the idea that a single utterance may perform multiple illocutionary acts at once. These approaches, classified as either context-dependent or context-independent, offer distinct perspectives on how such plurality is structured, conceptualized, and categorized. It is shown that adopting a multi-act perspective yields a more nuanced and explanatory account of linguistic meaning and of the complexity of actual language use, especially in contexts where multiple illocutionary forces interact within a single, unified utterance.