The volume deals with the topic of illocutionary shell nouns in English, i.e. nouns that encapsulate a content that is usually expressed in a complement or in a separate sentence or clause, and report or characterize it as a specific speech act. The book reports a usage-based study of the complementation patterns in a corpus of 335 illocutionary nouns distributed across the five Searlean classes of assertive, commissive, directive, expressive, and declarative nouns. The investigation aims to verify the association between the meaning of these nouns and their complementation patterns, and between their semantic similarity and the similarity in the distribution of complementation patterns.

Carla Vergaro is Associate Professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Perugia, Italy. Her main research interests lie in pragmatic linguistics, literary pragmatics, text and discourse analysis, cognitive semantics, and applied linguistics.