Illocutionary force is best described as

• A. The acoustic volume of speech.
• B. The speaker's intended function behind an utterance.
• C. The lexical semantics of the words.
• D. The syntactic structure of the sentence.

Answer: (B)

Illocutionary force is about the speaker’s intended function behind an utterance. In speech act theory, we distinguish what is said (the locution), what the speaker aims to accomplish (the illocution), and the effect on the listener (the perlocution). The illocutionary force captures that intended purpose—such as making a request, issuing a promise, issuing a command, or expressing an attitude—regardless of the literal wording. For example, “Could you pass the salt?” functions as a request, even though its syntactic form is a question. The other aspects—how loudly something is spoken (prosody), the meanings of individual words (lexical semantics), and the sentence’s grammar (syntax)—do not define the speaker’s intended function.