Gisela Harras

This is the second volume of the two-volume work Handbook of German Communication Verbs, edited by the renowned Institut fur Deutsche Sprache (IDS) Institute for German Language]. Whereas the first volume contains an analytical lexicon of all German speech act verbs, the second monographic volume includes information on and analysis of the communication verbs as a word class, their semantics and their function. Thus, a valuable reference work on one of the most complex and, for language use, most important word classes in the German language is complete. This handbook represents a standard work in linguistics."

Schriften des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache (SIDS) is published by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim. The IDS is one of the most prominent research institutes for research and documentation of the German language in the past and present. The renowned publications series SIDS publishes the results of research projects at the IDS. The series includes high-quality handbooks, e.g. Grammar of the German Language (Strecker/Hoffmann/Zifonun), and fundamental monographs on all areas of the grammar, pragmatics, lexicon and morphology of German. SIDS is a standard series of German linguistics.

This introductory work consists of two parts. In the first part, the most important aspects of analytic speech act theory are described and discussed. A central part of this is defining a general concept of human action and the question of how we communicatively handle actions. In the second part of the introduction, the basic assumptions of a theory of speech acts are discussed based on the speech act theories by Austin and Searle, as well as on Grice's communication theory.