 But even if Beardsley’s view that a literary work is a representation or imitation of a speech act is acceptable, still another curious feature of the argument concerns his treatment of the distinction between performing a speech act and representing the performance of a speech act. Beardsley writes as if the two were mutually exclusive. They’re not. While it’s true that it’s one thing to state that p and quite another to represent that someone is stating that p, representing (in language) is itself a speech act just as much as stating is. Representing that someone is stating that p is like stating that someone is stating that p—just a speech act with a more complicated conceptual content and structure than simply stating that p. Given that that’s so, the two halves of Beardsley argument,  (1)–(5)  and  (6)–(11),  merge.