This book provides an account of the speech acts of modern Irish (assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, declarative, and indirect speech acts), and their various significant clausal / sentential constructions. The study is strongly descriptive in the first instance while delivering an analysis of these diverse speech acts of Irish in a way that is intended to strike a balance between depiction, explanation, and technical characterisation. The choice of topics, the characterisation of speech and illocutionary acts, covered in this study is guided primarily by speech act theory. It relates the speech acts of Irish to each other, and looks to define each, in terms of their relationship to the situation of the utterance reflecting real-time language-in-use, with context and common ground, to identify their important properties.

This book is intended for a broad and diverse scholarly audience. Primarily, it is intended to be of value to linguists interested in the pragmatics of Irish. Linguists studying the interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics are likely to find many of the descriptions and analyses of the speech act language phenomena interesting and useful.