This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.comSpeech Act Theory, and the frameworks that follow, describe what language does in social spaces — the structural effects it produces in interaction. They say nothing about what any individual speaker consciously intends to produce. That is the theoretical position this series has taken from the start: the mechanism operates independently of motive. Goffman was mapping patterns of interaction, not taxonomies of bad faith.This work sits in the space between linguistics and lived experience — which means it is sometimes more certain about the mechanism than about the person. That is not a limitation to apologise for. It is the honest boundary of what structural analysis can and cannot do.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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