acts, but especially the "illocutionary act", are nowadays commonly classified as "speech acts". Austin was by no means the first one to deal with what one could call "speech acts" in a wider sense. The term 'social act' and some of the theory of this type of linguistic action are to be found in the fifth of Thomas Reid's Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788, chapter VI, Of the Nature of a Contract). Adolf Reinach (1883–1917) and Stanislav Škrabec (1844–1918) have been both independently credited with a fairly comprehensive account of social acts as performative utterances dating to 1913, long before Austin and Searle. The term "Speech Act" had also been already used by Karl Bühler. Overview Speech acts can be analysed on multiple levels: A locutionary act: the performance of an utterance: the actual utterance and its apparent meaning, comprising any and all of its verbal, social, and rhetorical meanings, all of which correspond to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance; an illocutionary act: the active result of the implied request or meaning presented by the locutionary act. For example, if the locutionary act in an interaction is the question "Is there any salt?" the implied illocutionary request is "Please pass the salt to me." or at least "I wish to add salt to my meal."; and under certain conditions a further perlocutionary act: the actual effect of the locutionary and illocutionary acts, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something, whether intended or not. Additionally, a metalocutionary act categorizes speech acts that refer to the forms and functions of the discourse itself rather than continuing the substantive development of the discourse, or to the configurational functions of prosody and punctuation. Illocutionary acts The concept of an illocutionary act is central to the concept of a speech act. Although there are several scholarly opinions regarding how to define 'illocutionary acts', there are some kinds of acts which are widely accepted as illocutionary. Examples of these widely accepted acts are commands or promises. The first of these opinions is the one held by John L. Austin who coined the term "speech act" in his book How to Do Things with Words published posthumously in 1962. According to Austin's preliminary informal description, the idea of an "illocutionary act" can be captured by emphasizing that "by