 And it’s probably a good thing that representing is a speech act. If “Milton!” in Wordsworth’s poem were being used in a representation that wasn’t the performance of any speech act at all, that would presumably be because it had no speech act potential. On the Alston/Beardsley theory of meaning, it would then have no meaning. Since it evidently does have meaning, it has to have some speech act potential. And since it seems to share a good deal of its meaning with “Milton!” as bellowed by a seventeenth century fish-monger hailing the poet, its speech act potentials within and without the poem must overlap to a fair extent—all this on the assumption that the Alston/Beardsley theory of meaning is correct. The gulf that Beardsley sees between literary discourse and non-literary discourse, as far as speech acts are concerned, thus isn’t nearly as wide as he seems to think, even if a literary work is a representation or imitation of a speech act.