The central question of this book is: How are fictional utterances - like writing a novel or telling campfire tales - described correctly? The author argues for the thesis that even these fictional linguistic utterances has to be described in terms of speech act theory, namely as illocutionary acts. Moreover with these linguistic acts authors or speakers create fictive characters. Those entities are abstract artefacts. Against this background it is possible to analyse fictional utterances as illocutionary acts of the type, John Searle calls declarations. Finally it is shown what this analysis means for the correct description of the acts of reference and predication as parts of fictional utterances.
