One current in historical pragmatics concerns illocutionary development and diachronic
analyses of speech acts (Arnovick 1999). Such questions have doubtless promised appealing
insights into the evolution of certain speech and language phenomena. But in the interest of
historical adequacy, it is appropriate to begin with tracing the emergence and development of
the theories of speech acts, their motivations, and their basic principles, rather than to take their
soundness and applicability to pragmatic phenomena for granted.