Illocution is what the speaker wants of his or her partner. It can be shown by the verbs that are caller performative. A performative verb is a verb in the form of the first person Present Indefinite Indicative and naming the intention of the speaker. It is called performative because by pronouncing it the speaker performs the named illocutionary act. For example, when somebody says “I promise that …” , he promises by pronouncing the word promise. But usually speech acts are formed without performative verbs and we understand the illocutionary component of the utterance through its structure in which the intonational patterns are most important. The illocutionary component is very often deduced through the logical procedure of inference. That means that the illocutions very often realise their meaning through oppositions of forms of utterances and thus they are liable to the grammatical analyses.
Unfortunately, the structure of features of utterances that show illocutionary meanings are not yet described systematically and the reply can hardly be interpreted. On the contrary, the meaningful aspect is almost completely explored and even the features that are understood through oppositions are found. Here we shall discuss only the meaningful side of the illocutionary component of the utterance.
It was found that the number of illocutions is very great, J.Austin himself found that English possesses more than two thousand verbs naming different illocutions. The result the investigators usually define groups of speech acts named by the meaning of the illocutionary components of them. As a rule five big classes of speech acts are defined. These are, if we follow the terminology of J.Austin, directives, which impose some obligations on the partner; declaratives, that change social situations; informatives, that describe a certain state of things; behabatives, that include ritual phrases expressing different social obligations and attitudes; emotives, that express the psychological state of the speaker.
Directives comprise such speech acts as order, demand, request, pleading, moreover, they also include speech acts that impose obligations upon the speaker such as promise.
Declaratives are different sorts of announcements and declarations such as announcement of inauguration of a high state official or declaration of the marital state. These speech acts usually include such verbs as declare or announce and the propositional component is normally with the verbs in the Present Tense.
Informatives are speech acts that are used most often and their illocutionary meaning is “I say that …”. In fact of illocutionary meaning of such speech acts is statement and their variants coincide with the variants of modality.
Behabatives are conventional and stable phrases pronounced to indicate a number of social obligations such as greetings, congratulations, expressing compassion and so on.
Emotives are speech acts which indicate such psychological states as joy, anger, fright, astonishment, etc. Very often they consist only of interjections and have no propositional component. Rather often the sentences used in such speech acts lose their referential meanings and turn into complicated interjections.
We can see that the meanings of the illocutionary component of a speech act is differentiated according to whom and what is said. Directives have quite definite addressees. The same is true for behabatives. On the other hand, declaratives and emotives have no definite addressees while informatives are neutral in this respect.