However, declaring one’s love is not the same for Sir Gawain and for a hip hop character in the 1990s. It is not only the linguistic (and non-linguistic) realisation that is different, but in a fundamental sense Sir Gawain and the hip hop character are not really doing the same thing (cf. Fritz this volume). Thus it is not clear that the illocutionary force is necessarily the best tertium comparationis, because different cultures, or one culture at two different points in history, may very well encode a different range of speaker attentions. Wierzbicka (1991) goes even further and advocates a kind of neo-Whorfianism, i.e. she believes that speech acts are so culture-specific that we cannot compare them across cultures.