Notes on the Success of Speech Acts and Negotiating Commitments

Technologies that support communication and models used in the development of communications need good underlying theories. One theory suggested as a base for design is speech act theory. Both communication support tools and modelling notations informed by speech act theory have been proposed. Speech act theory forms no unified, single theory, but actually houses several variants for dealing with semantics, pragmatics, and social context of communications. They all have one common feature: they assume that language is not merely a means of describing but also a means for doing things. In this paper we present an overview of speech act theories and their uses in information systems research.…