 In linguistics, there are two ways in which actions play a role: on the one hand, utterances are actions and on the other they can be used to talk about actions. The first leads to the study of speech acts, a branch of pragmatics, the second to the study of the semantics of action reports, hence is of a distinctly semantic nature. In addition to this, there is a special type of semantics, dynamic semantics, where meanings are not considered as state descriptions but as changes in the state of a hearer.