“Speech act” is a term coined by Searle, who, being a disciple of Austin, perfected the theory, presented in his book How to do things with Words, published in 1962. Speech acts are defined as what we do when we speak with words (Austin, 1962), such as carrying out a request, ordering, or refusing. The concept of speech acts was first proposed by philosophers of language such as Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1975, 1976), and the concept has subsequently been adapted to studies in sociology, psychology, and applied linguistics. Austin notes that some statements are acts in their own right, which he calls “performative” statements. By making a performative statement the speaker, instead of stating or describing something, actually performs an act. For example, statements such as “I do” in a wedding ceremony uttered by the couple and “I call this ship Queen Elizabeth” (P. 49), the speaker explicitly performs a speech act. In light of this, verbs like fare and in this case to name, belong to the category of performative verbs as far as Austin is concerned. Austin believes that every speech act has three dimensions: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. Phrase is where the literal meaning of the statement is taken as the overall meaning of what is being communicated. “I am thirsty” is a statement that expresses that the speaker is thirsty. Illocution has to do with the value that the speaker attributes to the locutionary act. I am thirsty can be expressed and understood as a simple physical state of the speaker but it can also refer to the request for something to drink. The speaker has added illocutionary meaning or illocutionary force to his statement. The perlocutionary aspect concerns the effect the statement has on the listener... middle of the paper... in all cultures. The Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989) also used the factor of social distance and power to investigate cross-cultural and cross-linguistic variation in the speech acts of requesting and apologizing. Some studies following the CCSARP (Wolfson, Marmor and Jones 1989, Olstain 1989) have shown that the two variables mentioned, together with other circumstantial factors, influence the choice of linguistic strategies. Blum-Kulka and House (1989) found that perceived social dominance was related to the level of directness/indirectness and that politeness and directness/indirectness are interrelated but not necessarily in a linear fashion. Searle (1975) argues that politeness is the most common motivation in the use of indirect speech acts. The more polite, the more indirect the act should be.