In the linguistic psychological literature, there is a classical distinction between direct and indirect speech acts. In particular, some theories claim that the latter are more difficult to produce and comprehend than the former. W e propose to abandon such a distinction in favour of a novel one between simple and complex speech acts. This distinction applies to any kind of pragmatic phenomena, from standard speech acts to non standard ones, like irony and deceit. Our proposal is based on the types of mental representations and mental operations involved in speech acts production and comprehension.

The analysis of perlocutionary acts is a fundamental component for a theory of human communication which accounts for the response of interactin gsubjects. We introduce two knowledge structures, namely games and contracts, which are used by the mental processes underlying perlocutionary acts. we present our mental processes underlying perlocutionary acts. We present our model through the discussion of an example of game; in particular we focus on the problem of shifting a from the wants of the actor to the wants of the partner.