Alston explains the performance of these acts through the concept of "taking responsibility" (
Alston’s central thesis is that for a sentence to have a particular meaning is for it to be to perform illocutionary acts of a matching type.
Meaning is determined by a sentence's potential to play the role a speaker intended.
Alston expands on the work of J.L. Austin and John Searle, categorizing illocutionary acts into five primary types:
The broader framework of speech-act theory, which Alston refines, identifies three distinct layers of an utterance:
