 Cohen’s reasoning assumes that any utterance of ‘I promise to read that novel’ is a promise. But as we have seen with the case of the somniloquist, neither a sentence, nor even the utterance of a sentence, is sufficient on its own for the performance of a speech act, be it a promise or some other. In a similar spirit to that of Cohen, Searle (1968, p. 407) observes that a serious and literal utterance of ‘I promise to read that novel,’ made under what he terms “conditions of successful utterance”, also counts as a promise. Searle concludes from this that some locutionary acts are also illocutionary acts, and infers from this in turn that for some sentences, their locutionary meaning determines their illocutionary force. This last inference is, however, a non sequitur. As we have seen, the aforementioned sentence’s meaning does not determine the illocutionary force with which it is uttered. Rather, when that sentence is uttered in such a way as to constitute a promise, what determines that force is the meaning of the sentence together with such factors as the speaker’s being serious and other contextual conditions being met.